October 2009, from somewhere over Europe…. sometimes perhaps on it…. and in all likelihood for the last part of the letter, high above the Atlantic, heading home …

Dear Family and Friends,

I am starting this letter on a flight from Amsterdam to London. But it’s a short distance and thus a short flight, and since I have a few more planes and trains ahead of me before heading home, I’ll write this as I go along and don’t really know where the final words will be composed.

With a team from HDNet, we’re here in Europe shooting two programs: the first is on the Dutch healthcare system, which is probably about the closest thing to where the United States probably is going in the controversial process of reforming American healthcare. The second is on the issue of assisted suicide. That part of the trip is motivated by a constitutional challenge from assisted suicide advocates in the state of Montana (with another possibly pending in Connecticut), and is taking us to the United Kingdom, which has had contentious battles about the prosecution of those who help their loved ones to commit suicide, and Switzerland, which has the world’s most liberalized laws. We’ll go to Montana for that part of the story once we get home again….and I learn to ride a horse.

It’s a good trip. Not just because both are meaty stories to which we can do justice in the documentary-style format of our “World Report” program on HDNet, but because….well, look at my agenda: the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. I mean, what’s wrong with that?!? Each is a nation with good food, unique and interesting culture, and wide command of English (although, in the spirit of My Fair Lady, one does run into Brits who require a bit of translation). Since most of my trips abroad take me to places that haven’t quite caught up to our comfortably civilized ways at home, a trip like this is a treat. By way of contrast, a few years ago a man in Peru, who decades earlier had spent a year in the United States, told us that the most important thing he learned from his time in America was the definition of a civilized country: it is a place, he said, where when you go to a restroom, you don’t have to carry in your own toilet paper. Let’s just say, throughout each of these European nations, you don’t have to carry in your own toilet paper!

Before I tell you about our stories, I’ve got to tell you about survival in the Netherlands, or for you old-timers who just can’t let go, Holland. As some of you know, I love riding bikes. At home I have a mountain bike on which I’ve crawled up and barreled down steep trails in Colorado and climbed and descended in total terror (don’t tell the guys I go with) along sheer limestone cliffs in the mountain-biking capital of Moab, Utah. And, I have a road bike, on which I’ve climbed 12,000-foot mountain passes with no shoulder between the road and the drop-off, and ridden several times in century events— most recently just the middle of last month amongst the trucks and busses of a sea-level city named New York. But none of those experiences comes closest to being my most dangerous encounter with a bike; that came in the Netherlands, this week…. every time I tried to cross the street!

Holland, you see, is a nation of bikes. Not because it has the right weather for biking— every day we were there it was cold and grey and damp. But because it is flat. I mean… FLAT. It’s almost as if the landscape lies flat on its back; bridges are the only hills (“Netherlands” in fact means “low lands.” Because they are). That doesn’t make for the most interesting biking in the world, because while sometimes it’s nice to ride from here to there without a mountain pass in your way, after a while you can get bored with the monotony of the horizon from flat roads and the unchanging pace on the pedals. But it does make for relatively easy biking. Or at least it would, if people had relatively easy bikes. The Dutch don’t. Most have relics that look like they’re made of iron; I picked one up and it felt heavier than my two bikes combined with Carol’s thrown in too. That’s because they’re not climbing, they’re just riding. So they have these simple upright bikes built of iron with generator lights and spring seats and baskets in front to carry their groceries and sometimes their kids, even their dogs.

That’s all just fine. The trouble is, bicyclists have godlike status; bikes are kings and they rule the roads. If you like to ride like I do, you might not think that sounds so bad. But I wasn’t a bicyclist there; I was a pedestrian. And bikes in the Netherlands trump everything else: trams, cars, pedestrians. They don’t just have bike lanes like ours, where a broken white line punctuated by a stenciled bicyclist defines the corridor. No, they have their own passageways, usually separated by narrow elevated islands from the cars on one side and the sidewalks on another. But these passageways for bikes look just like the sidewalks. Every time you come out of a building, or cross the street from one corner to another, first you alight from the sidewalk by crossing the island to the bike lane, then from the bike lane across another island to the street, then back across the other bike lane and finally to the sidewalk on the opposite side.

And the bikes don’t stop for anybody. Which means that drivers in their cars, hoping to turn right, have to look sharply over their shoulders to ensure that a bike heading in the same direction isn’t barreling straight along in the bike lane. And that pedestrians like me have to look both ways (bikes are going both ways in most lanes) before stepping into and across a bike lane at our peril. The experience reminded me of a man Carol and I knew from New York. He went to London on business twice every year for decades. Yet after all those visits, one day he forgot himself and looked left instead of right when he stepped off a curb and got killed by a bus. My guess is, had he gone instead to Amsterdam on a regular basis rather than London, he wouldn’t have survived even as long as he did.

Maybe that’s a good segue to the new healthcare system in the Netherlands, which is less than three years old. I don’t even know if it covers foreigners who get sick or hurt (by bikes, for instance) while visiting— I didn’t think of that question in all the interviews I did and only came up with it while writing this sentence (the story of my life and probably true for many journalists; it happens to me a lot. Kind of like having an argument but only thinking of your best retorts right after you walk away!). I do remember that when we lived in London (okay, so I’m not quite ready to begin my description of Dutch healthcare), a friend visiting from the States hurt her leg and we had to take her to the hospital where, because of the National Health system there, she got full treatment without paying a penny. You can argue of course that the taxpayers had to pay and you’d be right but still, it demonstrates the simplicity of getting healthcare.

Britain is what’s called a “single payer” system where the entirety of publicly-financed healthcare is available to everyone in the country. It’s the “safety net” concept and it’s far far far from perfect, mainly because it always depends on a piece of the pie in the national budget. When money is tight, so too, probably, is the quality of healthcare. However, we had the option while living there of paying extra, or of applying our employer-purchased or personally-purchased insurance to private healthcare, and we did. But we also used the National Health from time to time— for example, when Jason was born, we did it with a private doctor in a private hospital (the same one in which Princess Diana bore her sons). But pre-natal and post-natal care (including home visits, believe it or not) was provided by the state in the interest of nipping problems in the bud. For something like the first year, we even got a bi-monthly check (or “cheque” as they say there) meant to be used for milk. The funny part is, it was always addressed only to Carol, in keeping with the British conviction that if the father got his hands on the milk money, he’d drink it down at the pub. T’was, for me, a very dry period in my life.

But back to Holland. No matter whether foreigners are covered there, our program is about healthcare for the Dutch themselves, and how it works. The answer is, not perfectly (even its most ardent advocates call it a work in progress), but from almost everyone’s point of view, it works pretty darned well. Why? A few reasons: 1) It is universal, meaning, everyone has it. 2) The insurance companies are private. When it comes to the controversial concept in the American debate about a “government option,” government in the Netherlands isn’t involved in the insurance business. 3) When you apply for insurance, the company to which you apply cannot turn you down. Pre-existing conditions? No worries, come on down! 4) When the companies take on a high-risk patient, the government subsidizes them for doing so from something called the Risk Equalization Fund. 5) All kids to the age of 18 have coverage paid not by the families but by the government, from employer contributions not unlike ours. 6) Coverage puts a heavy emphasis on preventive healthcare, so when an illness is just starting, the insurers spend a little at an early stage instead of a lot later on.

Now, here’s the part that some will find most objectionable but I’m not sure how to avoid it if universal coverage is the goal: 7) The government sets the rules, which really means it issues the mandates for what you might call the “minimal” insurance policy to which everyone is entitled for a minimum monthly premium (which still covers an awful lot). But here’s the counterbalance to that). The insurance companies, which have to offer that minimal policy for a mandated price, also offer supplemental policies with whatever additional benefits they want to offer at whatever prices they think they can get. If I’m a consumer, I can shop around for these supplemental benefits and let the companies compete for my business, and if an insurance company doesn’t like me (because, say, the insurer sees risk, which in my case makes him a pretty smart fellow!), it can turn me down. An example: we had a “fixer” in the Netherlands, a freelance journalist we hired to help us arrange our interviews and just get around. She told me her family has supplemental insurance and I asked how she chose which company’s policy to buy. Her answer was, she has two young teenagers and one company offered particularly comprehensive orthodontic care, so that’s the one she picked. Finally: 9) The Dutch pay roughly half of what we Americans (those of us with health insurance at all) pay.

That might lead you to ask, how do they do it? Believe me, we didn’t hear any horror stories about long waits for elective surgery or horrible experiences with the quality of healthcare, the kinds of things many Americans fear if we go to a system in our country that mirrors, say, Canada (with the government acting as sole insurer) or Britain (all depending on a piece of the pie in the national budget). Government’s function in the Netherlands is twofold: collecting the funds for subsidies, and setting the rules for minimal coverage.

Otherwise, it’s the private insurance companies that ensure the quality of care, because with the need to compete directly for the business of every citizen, they are motivated to try to offer better supplemental policies than their competitors, at better prices. The way they can best do that is by negotiating for the best deals with the providers: doctors, hospitals, and so forth. Truth be known, there is some fear that the system will drive prices down to the point where the only way for medical providers to survive is to diminish the quality of the service; reducing staffing, for example, in hospitals. But so far, it seems to be more a fear than a reality, and when I interviewed the Minister of Health, he told me that’s one of the things in this “work in progress” that they’re trying to prevent.

Since I still want to tell you about our “assisted suicide” story, which at this point in the occasional composition of this letter we’ve already started shooting— I’m typing this part right now on a train north from London to Leeds— I’ll finish with an anecdote about the Dutch healthcare system. The law requires that every insurance company accepts all comers, and that every citizen applies. But in keeping with human nature, about one percent of the people don’t. Maybe it’s because they prefer to take their chances…and maybe it’s just because they prefer to spend their money on Heineken. Well, if they get caught, which sometimes happens when suddenly they need costly medical care and think they can get away with applying for insurance for the first time, they have to pay not only the sum total of the premiums they’ve skipped, but a 30% penalty on top of that.

It sounded a bit steep to me, so I asked the health minister how they could justify that. His answer was logical— maybe not acceptable to every political persuasion, but logical. For one thing, part of the rationale for universal coverage in the first place is that when someone without insurance needs medical attention, those who have it end up paying (shades of the U.S.). For another, the whole concept of insurance— especially when it’s provided solely by private companies— is that you pay for a long time but might or might not ever take advantage of your coverage; that is part of the way insurance companies make their money. Therefore, the people who have dodged the mandate in the Netherlands to buy insurance have, in effect, cheated the insurance companies of the easy profit they would have made while these people were healthy.

The U.S. surely won’t end up with a system just like the Dutch, but if we do come up with any change at all, we probably shall pull more elements from their system than from any other.

We also could do worse than to pull one of their culinary traditions into our own: “rijstofel” (RYE-shtah-full). Actually it’s from Indonesia, where the Dutch were the colonial power for a century-and-a-half… although when I was in Indonesia in January, I never ate anything that came close to what I ate in Amsterdam. I knew to look for it because thirty years ago, when we went with some visiting friends to Holland, we had a rijstofel I never forgot, but never have been able to duplicate. It’s kind of a smorgasbord of tastes and ingredients, with fish and lamb and pork and poultry and beef. Lots of sauces, lots of rice, one of those meals like a shared Chinese feast where every bite is better than the last one. We had it twice. (I might as well tell you the name of the place, for those who might some day visit Amsterdam. It is “Kantjil” at Spuistraat 291. Phone 020 620 0994. (www.kantjil.nl)

Okay, time (in a manner of speaking) for “assisted suicide.” In the culture of media-driven labels and modern politics, advocates for liberalized laws on assisted suicide don’t actually call it assisted suicide; they call it “assisted dying.” But they’re one and the same thing. What you shouldn’t call it though is “euthanasia.” Why not? Because it’s not, and for those who don’t know (which included me until about two weeks ago when I started reading about it), that’s the first distinction to explain. Assisted suicide means, someone assists. In other words, if you’re the one who wants to kill yourself, I’m the one who gets you the poison, or hands you the plastic bag, or drives you to the bridge. On the other hand, euthanasia means the “assister” actually conducts the act. So again, if you’re the one who wants to die, I’m the one who puts the poison in your mouth, or puts the bag over your head, or pushes you off the bridge.

It may sound like an academic difference until you think about some of the people who want to commit suicide. Because of disease or paralysis, they are literally unable to do it by themselves; one of the most compelling books I’ve ever read is called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. It is a true story about a guy in France— in fact it is by the guy— who had the worst kind of stroke and could not breath on his own, nor talk, nor touch, nor control a single movement from his temple to his toes. It was the classic case of a man who can think trapped inside a body that’s inert. The only thing over which he had any control was one eyelid, which he could blink voluntarily. With the patient help of friends who held a board with all the letters of the alphabet arranged in order of their frequency of use in French, that is how he laboriously dictated the book. Surely there are plenty of people on this planet with terrible disabilities who, like most of us, want to live every day they are granted and get unlimited joy out of life. If you’re reading this letter, you probably read my last one about the young motivational speaker born with no arms or legs. He exemplifies the ability to be positive despite disabilities.

But some aren’t so positive, and if you think ‘But for the grace of God go I,’ who can condemn them?! The problem for them is, they can’t necessarily put themselves out of their misery alone. They cannot take the poison without help…. or pull the bag over their heads or jump off the bridge. Back in my ABC days I did a story on what was then just a ballot initiative to legalize assisted suicide in Oregon, and I interviewed a man whose wife had been painfully and completely disabled and wanted to die. Ultimately, they tried all sorts of things to enable her to carry out the final act, to avoid having him prosecuted for murder. But she was physically unable to do it. So ultimately, he carried out what I’d call a mercy killing. With his wife’s consent, he put a plastic bag over her head until she suffocated. Which I call an unnecessarily tragic way to die. But which prosecutors call murder.

Just about everyplace where assisted suicide is legal— which includes the two American states of Oregon and Washington where voters have approved it— euthanasia is not. But here’s another concept worth contemplating, and in a way it’s at the heart of the advocates’ arguments: suicide most places these days is not illegal, yet helping someone carry it out is.

There are several reasons why, and while personally I support the idea of assisted suicide, I think the reasons are rational. For one thing, there has to be some sort of control over the means of the assisted death. Thankfully, few of us are experts in the act of killing, and we might end up either helping in a way that prolongs the person’s pain in the process, or botching it and simply leaving the suicidal individual alive but in even worse shape than before. For another thing, there has to be a way— at least a law— to prevent anyone from assisting in someone else’s suicide for his or her own personal gain. Certainly in cases where, say, one spouse helps another, there is personal gain— the inheritance of money, the sole assumption of home ownership— but the important thing prosecutors have to ask is, was that the motive for helping with the death, or was the assister compelled by compassion?

We went to Great Britain to ask about those issues. Britain has had laws against assisted suicide for almost fifty years. But when prosecutors have investigated cases after the fact, they often have compassionately excused people who could show that they were only helping relieve some kind of unbearable suffering. However, it has always been on a case-by-case basis, with no guarantee that next time, a husband who helps his wife take her life won’t be nailed for some form of murder.

Enter 46-year-old Debbie Purdy. She is a vital, vibrant, vivacious woman in the Yorkshire city of Leeds who has had Multiple Sclerosis for more than a decade. There are cases of MS where it never takes a heavy toll, but also cases where those who suffer it slowly slide into permanent states of pain and total disability. Sadly, Debbie is on the latter course. Understanding what she does about MS, she knows that clinically the odds are high that her condition today, where she is stuck in a wheelchair and her skin burns and her eyesight is blurry, will worsen.

But that’s not all that scares her. She also knows that sometimes the MS weakens people’s musculature to the point where they cannot swallow, which not only means they can’t eat but they also can’t inhale and exhale on their own without gasping violently for every breath; they could suffocate without artificial assistance. Debbie Purdy doesn’t want it to go that far. Right now she is full of life and full of joy and spent the hours she dedicated to us in her Leeds home with sea-blue eyes bright with excitement and an infectious smile permanently flashing across her face. But while we did talk about things that make her happy, we mostly talked about her deterioration, and her death. When you are sitting almost knee-to-knee with someone who’s telling you that she probably will want to die before her time, with her husband helping her every step of the way, it’s chilling.

It’s chilling because it’s not just academic. As Debbie’s MS worsens, her joy will end. That’s when she wants to die. The problem is, if she can’t be positively sure that her husband won’t be prosecuted for helping her, she’ll take her life before she’s ready but while she can still do it by herself. That would cheat her of immeasurable time with a quality of life she still treasures. Yet as her MS spreads its impairment, the door to carry out her suicide alone is closing.

And that is why she went to court, eventually getting a decision last month by none less than the House of Lords— the ultimate authority on British law— that ordered the Director of Public Prosecutions (like the boss of district attorneys) to issue guidelines about who he’d prosecute for assisted suicide and who he wouldn’t. The guidelines weren’t a total victory for advocates in the United Kingdom— they want it legalized. But the chief prosecutor gave them a green light of sorts. He said that if someone helps someone else to die for compassionate reasons, and with the consent of the person committing suicide, and not for personal gain, it will be allowed.

But— and here’s the catch— it still will not be allowed on British soil. Just as there is only a small handful of states in the U.S. that allow assisted suicide, there is only a handful of western nations that allow it, and of them all, Switzerland has the least restrictive laws, which is why Switzerland is where we ended our trip. The most restrictive law everywhere else is that it pertains only to residents. But not in Switzerland. You can travel to Switzerland from wherever you live and legally have help when you kill yourself. What’s more, unlike Oregon and Washington and a couple of other countries, which require a doctors’ consensus that someone has a terminal condition, in Switzerland a suicide can be assisted simply (as if anything about it is simple) if someone is enduring “unbearable suffering.”

That can be a slippery slope. In my mind, Debbie Purdy with her degenerative disease qualifies, as does someone with a grave disease or an injury that promises a low quality of life, but where to draw the line? Someone who hates his disability— blindness maybe, or paralysis— but isn’t actually in decline, let alone pain? Someone with severe depression? Or mental illness? How about a businessman whose enterprise has gone bankrupt? Or a young woman who has broken up with her boyfriend? Or a teenager who got failing grades in school and fears his parents’ wrath? There are suicides every day under those conditions; should it be legal to help them carry it out?

In Switzerland, the only thing the law specifically proscribes is death for the purpose of personal gain. That’s why, every time there’s an assisted suicide in Switzerland, the prosecutor of the canton (the region) investigates. But I interviewed the prosecutor in the canton of Zurich and he said they’re really looking only at two things: motive, and method, which means ensuring that the suicide is only “assisted” and not an act of euthanasia.

If it was chilling talking with Debbie Purdy about planning her own death, it was equally chilling talking with the founders of the two organizations in Switzerland that help people like Debbie carry them out, especially when one of the interviews was in front of a bed in a room where three days earlier there had been a death and the day after, another was scheduled. One interview was in Lausanne, the French-speaking part of the country, and the other— the one in front of the bed— was near German-speaking Zurich. Both are older men (who am I to talk?) who are committed to what they consider the right to kill yourself when you’re ready.

One organization is called EXIT, the other DIGNITAS (which is Latin for dignity, since the whole concept is about death with dignity). Interestingly, Exit only helps Swiss people carry out their suicides. When I asked the French-speaking founder, himself an ENT doctor, why, he explained that there is more than enough demand in his own country and he simply doesn’t have the resources to help anyone from without its borders. Dignitas, on the other hand, only helps people from abroad.

But both organizations do what they do pretty much the same way. Someone applies, there are consultations (including conversations about whether there is some alternative to suicide), and eventually the “applicant’s” wish is provisionally granted. In the case of Exit, a team goes to the applicant’s home. The family is welcome to be there at the end. In the case of Dignitas, the applicants and whoever wants to be with them come to headquarters near Zurich.

A doctor’s consent is required, although not to affirm that someone is fit to die. The doctor is needed to prescribe the poison that will kill them. When the day comes, the suicidal patients first are given an anti-vomiting medication, then a lethal dose of the barbiturate Sodium Pentobarbital, which puts them into a deep coma and then brings their breathing to a halt. And they are gone. The head of Exit told me that when people object to what he does, he points out that by expediting a peaceful death, he is preventing a violent one. When you think about people who take up a gun or jump off a bridge or hang from a rope, his argument does not sound irrational.

The other argument against assisted suicide, of course, is a moral one. Generally it takes the shape of, “Who are you to play God?” The head of Dignitas (a human rights lawyer) had an answer for that, which wouldn’t end the argument but also, to me, makes sense. What he said was, he’s not killing anybody. He’s only helping them to kill themselves, and to do so of their own free will. In fact for the prosecutor’s sake he documents every suicide on video, and the very last question he asks someone, literally as the cup of poison is close to their lips (or, in some drastic cases, their gastric tubes), is, “You can still stop. Do you want to stop, or do you want to die?” Last year, 196 people said, “Die.”

I don’t have a moral objection to any of it. But I appreciate the genuine passion of those who do. I suppose the only thing to say is, if it’s not for you, don’t ever do it. Of course that’s not a ironclad argument, mainly because if you do object on moral grounds, you might believe that anyone who helps someone else die is actually committing murder. It falls into the category of debates about abortion and capital punishment and stem cell research….which means I can just leave it hanging out there because I’m surely not going to convince anyone with this letter.

That brings me, if you’ll excuse the grim pun, to the final chapter. In London, we interviewed a guy named Edward Turner. Which leads to another short digression. It was fun for me when we pulled up to Turner’s home on Fitzroy Square, just east of the West End, because back when I was based in London, and we had to do some kind of on-camera standup late in the evening with a London background, we went the half-dozen blocks from the ABC bureau to Fitzroy Square, because its buildings have elegant Edwardian facades, and at night are illuminated.

But it wasn’t much fun talking with Edward Turner. He is the treasurer of an organization in the UK that is pushing for laws permitting assisted suicide, and he comes to the issue with personal experience. Early in this decade, his father died of a degenerative neurological disease, and by the end, as Edward bluntly put it to me, although his lungs were still sucking in air, his father was no more than “a rotting stinking corpse.” He died in great pain and great indignity. So when his mother came down with a similar disease just a couple of years later, she said she didn’t want to die as her husband had. Edward promised her that she wouldn’t. When the time came, Edward and his siblings took their mother to Zurich, where she took her poison and forever fell asleep.

The Turner siblings weren’t arrested but they could have been. They had assisted their mother before ever leaving home by buying her plane ticket to Switzerland. Then they took her to the airport in London, pushed her wheelchair into the airplane, pushed it off in Zurich, and delivered her to the place of her death. The only thing they didn’t do was hold the cup from which she took her last drink. Earlier in this letter, when I used the phrase “but for the grace of God go I,” I didn’t mean it in a religious sense. What I meant was, this could be any of us. If I ever get to the point where life is only something to painfully and fearfully endure, I hope I’ll be able to end it on my terms. And if someone I love gets to that point and they want my help, I hope I’ll be able to help them. It is horrible to contemplate any of this, and hopefully only hypothetical, but without laws that enable us to make such choices, it may be even worse.

In my work, I have seen a lot of life but also a lot of death. I am lucky that it hasn’t laid me low with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, but it has affected me as it must. What it has left me believing is, death is not just the end of life, it is a part of life. Anyway, as Woody Allen once said, “No one gets out of this life alive.”

Greg's new book

On that cheery note, I wish everyone well because, while many people every day go through unpleasant stages of life, life in our world is good. As predicted, I am signing off somewhere over Greenland and will probably send this from the first stop in Washington DC. What I saw online before leaving Switzerland was, it’s snowing in Colorado. Ski resorts open soon. Like I said, life is good.

Greg

PS: Since I gave you all a restaurant recommendation for Amsterdam, I might as well be globally impartial and do the same for Zurich and London. In Zurich, there is an old armory right at the heart of the most charming part of the city that has only been around since five years before Columbus. But trust me, the food is fresh. And deliciously Swiss. It is “Zeughauskeller,” at Bahnhofstrasse 28a, phone 044 211 2690, www.zeughauskeller.ch. And, London. Mind you, anyone London-bound can send to me for “Greg’s Guide to London,” but I had a particularly wonderful experience this week at a French restaurant called “Le Cellier du Midi.” It was wonderful because the restaurant is in Carol’s and my old neighborhood of Hampstead, and we used to go to this place when we lived in London. The wonderful thing is, after all these years, it is just as good as it ever was. 28 Church Row, London NW3. 020 7435 9998. www.LeCellierDuMidi.com.

Read Greg’s new book “Life in the Wrong Lane,”
available at bookstores everywhere.

Life in the Wrong Lane by Greg Dobbs

BoomerCafé co-founder and executive editor Greg Dobbs has a new book out. It is called “Life in the Wrong Lane,” because that’s where Greg — a longtime producer, then correspondent for ABC News, now a correspondent for HDNet Television — has spent most of his life: in the wrong lane, trying to get into places when smart, normal people are trying to get out. He thinks you older boomers might appreciate this excerpt from his coverage of the Indian occupation of Wounded Knee, when he and a cameraman named Art were trying to sneak into the besieged South Dakota settlement at night.

The sky had cleared. There was snow on the ground, but a starry sky and a bit of moonlight. In case you think that’s good news, think again. It wasn’t bright enough to actually help us see the barbed wire. It was just bright enough to make Art and me stand out against the white snow. That meant we had to stay just below the ridgelines if we could, even though that’s where the drifts of snow were deepest. But if we didn’t, we were sitting ducks. Or hiking ducks, if anyone was watching.

The trouble with crossing through barbed wire at night, with or without snow on the ground, is that you never know whether you’ve merely climbed to the other side, or crawled into something. This fact didn’t occur to me until we did precisely that.

We had crossed through three or four barbed wire fences uneventfully. It wasn’t easy because at each one, I’d have to put my equipment down in the snow, crawl through while Art held the strands apart, take each piece of gear Art handed me over the top, hold the strands apart for him to crawl through, then pick everything up and start out again.

This time though, we never got that far. I put everything down and with Art’s help, crawled through. But before I could grab hold of the first piece of gear, something grabbed hold of me. A dog. He had my cuff in his mouth. In an instant, several more were barking wildly and racing to join the fun. I could hardly see them, but I didn’t need a good look to have a fair idea where I was. It was some kind of dog pen, and all the dogs were all over me, growling and barking and snapping at my pants.

Greg Dobbs

I’ll tell you this: you can get through a barbed wire fence mighty fast when you want to. Just grab the top strand with your gloved hands, pull it down, and pull yourself over. You will lose a little skin. But that’s better than losing a leg. And you don’t even need Art’s help.

After that, we were scared. Not just that we might stumble into another dog pen, but that there surely must be some feds hotfooting it toward the noise of the dogs. So we decided to get as far from the pen as possible, as fast as we could.

What that meant was, we couldn’t carry on along the hidden ridgelines. We’d have to cut straight across the reflective fields and take our chances. That’s when we got caught.

The first sign was maybe a hundred yards ahead of us, at the top of a hill, silhouetted in the dark night. A lone figure, erect, like a statue at the top of a treeless slope, the barrel of his rifle standing out against the night sky. He seemed to be peering right down at us. If he was a fed, he was just waiting to clamp on the cuffs.

We stopped short and whispered to each other. Fed, or Indian, or angry rancher? No way to know. But it didn’t really matter. Whoever he was, he wasn’t acting real friendly.

We could cut fast to the left or right and hope to outrun him. We were weighted down with tens of thousands of dollars in camera equipment, but who knows? Maybe in this deep snow, we could move just as fast as he could.

And maybe we couldn’t. Furthermore, outrunning him might not be our biggest risk. What if he shoots at us? Could we outrun the bullet?

So we decided to surrender. After all, if he was an Indian, he’d probably help lead us back to Wounded Knee. If he was a rancher, he’d probably read us the riot act and tell us to get the hell off his land. And if he was a fed, well, we were just journalists. Sure, we were trespassing, and sure, we had illegally crossed a government barrier, but if this was an agent, what would the government do to us except slap our hands and send us home?

“We’re journalists and we’re not armed.” I tried to keep my voice calm as we took maybe a dozen steps in his direction. But he was calmer than I was; he hardly moved. And he didn’t say a single word back to us. So now, Art spoke.

“I’m Art Levy. I’m a cameraman for TVN. My partner is Greg Dobbs. He’s a producer for ABC.” And with that, we took another dozen steps toward our captor.

But he didn’t respond. Nor move. We could still make out the shape of the rifle’s barrel.

“We’ll put our hands in the air, just to show you we mean no harm.” Art seemed to have the right idea now. Just as we could only see this guy in silhouette, maybe that’s how he saw us. And all our protruding equipment, which just as easily could have looked to him like weapons as TV gear. Picture me, walking along with this long tripod sticking out front. In the darkness of the night, it looks like a long gun. “Just give us a few seconds to put all our equipment down.”

We set everything down in the snow. That should reassure him. And we put our arms in the air. That should too. And we took a few more steps. He didn’t take even one. This was beginning to worry us. It’s bad enough to get arrested. Worse still to be captured by some nut with other things in mind. But that was how it seemed to be shaping up.

“Look.” My turn again. “We’re going to keep coming toward you, slowly, unless you tell us to stop. And we’ll keep our arms in the air. But we want you to see us, and we want to show you our press credentials, and show you that we don’t have any weapons.”

He didn’t say not to, so we began stepping through the deep snow. One tall step after another, closer and closer to the mysteriously still and silent figure. Remember, it’s a dark night. We’d have to be nearly nose to nose to make out more than just his shape.

Which is what it took. It wasn’t until Art and I were just a couple of yards from this stoic figure that we could see that he wasn’t an Indian. Or a rancher. Or a federal agent.

This guy had four legs. We were surrendering to a Black Angus bull. With a long horn that stood out above his head like a rifle.

We were so shaken, we apologized.

It’s easy to order Greg’s new book. Click here – Life in the Wrong Lane

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“Sick.” That’s what my baseball team, the red-hot Colorado Rockies, are calling themselves these days: “sick.” They’ve even printed it on t-shirts they’re wearing around the clubhouse: four big, bold, black letters in the center of the chest: “SICK.”

If someone’s young — like, pre-baby boomer — sick’s a good thing. But I’m a boomer — one of the oldest boomers — and have pretty much gone through life believing there was nothing good about being sick. Come to think of it, the last time I’m aware that anyone with the Rockies was “sick” was when superstar shortstop Troy Tulowitzki missed a game with the flu. That was the one game in our last home stand during the wildcard race against the Giants that we lost.

Of course this really isn’t much different than when I was young and said something was “really cool.” That probably made my mom stop and think, “Hmm, he thinks it’s cool. Should I be turning up the heat?” Which reminds me, wasn’t there also a time when “hot” didn’t mean someone sexy?

Mind you, it’s all evolutionary. I’ll bet when my dear parents helped make “groovy” verbally vogue, their own parents’ hair stood on end. Language is meant to evolve. Some languages don’t, but ours does. Big-time. That’s why Merriam-Webster issues a brand new dictionary every ten years. In the last edition, one synonym for “good” was “bad.” Go figure.

But still, I haven’t quite come to terms with every change in our common-use vocabulary. Like the word “awesome.” That should apply — at least in the mind of this old fogy — to the Grand Canyon, the space shuttle, the Taj Mahal. They are nothing less than awesome. Totally awesome.

But as I write this, I’m in Florida to cover the latest launch of the totally awesome space shuttle, and on two consecutive days, when I’ve had a couple of spare hours, I’ve done what I do every time I’m here. I’ve gone to a local surf shop in Cocoa Beach and rented a bike. Don’t ask why a surf shop rents bikes, because that’s not the point of the story. And don’t ask why anyone would be dumb enough to rent a bike when the temperature is in the 90s and there’s humidity to match.

The point of the story is, when you rent a bike here, they protect their huge investment in a fleet of rusty old beach bikes that have no gears, old-fashioned foot brakes, and chains that come off half the time, by taking an imprint of your credit card as a deposit and making a photocopy of your driver’s license.

So on the second day I was here, since I was renting same bike, I gave the young woman behind the counter the imprint and the photocopy she had returned to me from the day before, so she wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of making new ones. And what do you think she called my thoughtful deed? “Awesome.” Maybe when Einstein handed someone his famous formula for the relationship between energy and matter, they rightly said, “Awesome.” When Neil Armstrong handed in the soil he brought back from the moon, “awesome” would have worked just fine. But for holding onto copies of my license and my credit card? Not so much.

What scares me is, language is losing meaning, and the post-baby-boomers are the ones who are behind it. Just as “sick” should be reserved for something bad, “awesome” should be reserved for something great. If we aren’t satisfied with the words we have, let’s just come up with new words, rather than adulterating the old ones. How about “fabumarkable?” Or, “incredisational.” Of course maybe, when we want to describe an act or an object that really is awesome, we ought to just use a word we already have, a word that already means something really terrific: “sick.”

Check out Greg’s new book – “Life in the Wrong Lane.” It’s all about life as a television news correspondent, and it is … like, totally cool.

Greg Dobbs on HDNet

Late Monday night (actually Tuesday morning in Florida), I’ll be on the air again from the Kennedy Space Center with the launch of space shuttle Discovery. Liftoff is set for 1:36:02 AM EDT Tuesday morning (yes, you read that right, it is timed to the tenth of a second), so we’ll broadcast from 1 AM to 2 AM EDT Tuesday, which is midnight to 1 AM Central Time, 11 PM to midnight Monday night in the Mountain Time Zone and 10-11 PM in the Pacific.

If you’re thinking about the six-count-em-six delays last time for Endeavour … so am I! It took me only three trips to Florida to see that baby go up. But two pieces of good news for NASA: the countdown started last night and so far, so good. And, NASA’s weather experts put the odds of a launch at 70%. I’ve seen them go up when the odds weren’t half that good.

Although it’s not the primary piece of cargo, one of the devices Discovery is carrying to space is the COLBERT treadmill, which is named after Stephen Colbert. You might remember reading that he staged a write-in from his viewers during NASA’s contest to name the newest U.S. module on the International Space Station. He won, but NASA wasn’t willing to go that far; the second-place entry, “Tranquility,” got the nod. However, with about as much humor as you can expect from a government agency, they decided to put his name on the treadmill. But only by doing what anyone might expect them to do: they turned it into an acronym. So, COLBERT stands for “Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistance Treadmill.”

~ Greg

HDNet covers all shuttle launches live. It’s on DirecTV, Dish Network, Comcast (in most of the country) and most other cable systems in the US and Canada.

Greg’s new book, “Life in the Wrong Lane,” has just been published by iUniverse and will soon be available at book sellers everywhere. It’s the inside scoop on life and adventures as a television correspondent.

Neda

By David Henderson -

Much of the world has kept track of events in Iran following the questionable outcome of elections there on June 12 via Twitter. With severe restrictions by the regime in Iran on media coverage and apathy by the news media in the West, Twitter has served to redefine how many of us view the concept of media in the Internet era.

Nothing has been more profound, in my opinion, than watching video of a young woman named Neda Soltan die on the streets of Tehran yesterday. She was a student of philosophies at Tehran University. According to reports, she was shot by a police sniper while standing with her father or university professor, watching protesters.

Neda Soltan

The video is haunting, especially her last moment alive when she looked at the camera as if to seek our help. At least that was what I saw in her eyes.

The story of Neda is being heard around the world today, carried first by people, sharing on Twitter and online. We no longer living in an era when some editor or TV producer makes decisions for us but rather we are sharing information and drawing our own conclusions.

My feeling is that the image and memory of Neda will endure as an icon, a reminder that we must not permit innocence and peace to be destroyed by tyranny and corruption.

Just let me share this prayer for Neda and others in Iran today.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

By Greg Dobbs -

Maybe Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fixed the election. But we have to ponder another plausible possibility: maybe he didn’t.

Why not? Because maybe he didn’t have to. He runs a repressive and dangerous regime, his police forces have brutally put down their own countrymen, and we’d love to see him ousted. But we might not speak for the majority of the president’s fellow citizens. History is my guide.

The first of many trips that I took to Iran for ABC News to cover the revolution, then the hostage crisis, was more than 30 years ago. With insurgents at his heels, the Shah was hanging on by a thread. The United States stuck with him because he still had some local support, but to virtually every journalist covering the run-up to the revolution, that support was pencil-thin. Generally the Shah’s backers were the rich and the educated. However, most Iranians were neither rich nor educated, and got no benefit from their authoritarian leader’s friendship with the West. Had there been an election in those days, the Shah’s challenger Ayatollah Khomeini wouldn’t have had to fix it. He’d have won hands-down.

In the three decades since, things have changed for the Persian people, some for better and some for worse. The suppressive violence surrounding Iran’s elections notwithstanding, there has been more free speech and open protest in recent years than we used to see under the Shah. What’s more, popular discontent with the country’s president is not primarily because of his radical rhetoric. No, it is mainly because of the economy; he has not figured out how to corral Iran’s rich resources.

The point is, just because we in the West detest somebody in the Third World doesn’t mean everyone within his own borders detests him. Or even most of them. The same Iranians who put Khomeini on a bandwagon and climbed aboard to ride it into the Islamic Republic are the ones who voted for Ahmadinejad. Does he command a majority today? Who knows, and anyway, the answer might now be moot, because the anger today on the streets of Tehran transcends the outcome of the election. But while the protests have been hugely impressive and impressively huge, all they prove is that Mir Hossein Moussavi, the comparative moderate who believes he should have won and we wish had won, has passionate support. Or perhaps more accurately, the notion of reform has passionate support, and Moussavi — like AyatollahKhomeini three decades earlier — is the messenger.

A close parallel is a recall election I covered a few years ago in Venezuela, this time for HDNet Television’s “World Report.” It was Hugo Chavez who was under fire, but the rich and educated weren’t in his camp; they wanted him out. I’ll never forget election day itself: we went to one well-to-do voting precinct in Caracas where the line of citizens waiting in the broiling sun to expel their president stretched for half a mile, which made me think the recall would work. But then we went to a sprawling slum, the kind of place where Chavez had bought support with his populist policies. The line was just as long, maybe longer. Sure enough, when the results were in, Chavez had beaten the recall. The Carter Center was down there too, and whether right or wrong, they confirmed the integrity of the outcome. Chavez’s opponents cried foul, but frankly reminded me of the Manhattan socialite who, after John Kerry’s bruising defeat in 2004 to George W. Bush, infamously said something like, “I just don’t understand it; I don’t know anyone who voted for Bush.”

Having covered stories in more than 80 countries, I have seen American foreign policy at its best and at its worst and at its worst, it assumes that people everywhere want what we want. They don’t. In some parts of the world, they want the kinds of rulers, and sometimes even political systems, that we condemn. The best example of that might be the Gaza Strip, which I’ve also covered for HDNet. The U.S. rightly encouraged free and open Palestinian elections; in Gaza, the terrorist group Hamas won. If that doesn’t teach us something, nothing will. We should shout out for the right of Iranians to demonstrate without consequences. And we should fight for Iran’s elections to be fair, but should not assume that if they are, we will like the outcome.

Dear Family and Friends,

Today I am going through a bit of culture shock. In the past few years I have traveled here to the Kennedy Space Center (where space shuttle Atlantis is supposed to blast off tomorrow) directly from Shanghai. I have also come non-stop from Moscow. (And, straight from the slopes at Vail.) Quick transitions are a sometimes exhilarating, sometimes disorienting part of my business. In mere days, sometimes even hours, my work over the years has taken me from scenes of unimaginable poverty to enviable riches, from the company of great powers to that of the powerless…. and from war to peace.

But the difference between yesterday and today may be the biggest transition of all, or at least the weirdest. Because while right now, as I write this, I am staring at a ship that manifests the highest technology man has ever produced — think of the shuttle as an eighteen-story building that weighs four and a half million pounds that will lift itself off the ground from a dead stop and eight minutes later be in space. Only yesterday I was with a camera crew on a ship with pretty much the same low technology its predecessors have used for eight generations: a thirty-foot crab boat in the Chesapeake Bay. A thirty foot boat, by the way, that pitches and rolls in 20 mph winds as if it’s sitting on the fault line of an earthquake.

The program we’re shooting is about the slow death of the bay. If you don’t live near the Chesapeake that might not seem so serious, but one way or another it has significance for virtually every American. Either because you like seafood such as oysters and crabs and the estuary of the Chesapeake traditionally has been one of our great providers. Or because you relate to the seventeen million fellow Americans who now live and work and play in the six-state watershed of (which means the drainage into) the Chesapeake. Or because you are aware that at 200 miles long and about 35 miles wide it is a huge geographical feature on the American map. Or because you are mindful of the Jamestown Colony and Captain John Smith and the origins of our culture and our country.

There’s no single reason why the Chesapeake Bay is dying, but that’s because there are several. Agricultural runoff is one. That might sound minor, but when you realize there are poultry and vegetable farms in six different states whose chemicals, like nitrogen, seep into small creeks that flow into tributary rivers that dump into the Chesapeake, you understand that it’s not. Then there is residential growth: nowadays, seventeen million people, whose lawn chemicals and sewage treatment effluent end up in the bay; one of growth’s negatives is the fact that asphalt aggravates the runoff because the use of the ground as a natural filter is lost. Then add in smokestack emissions from the iron belt and the general plague of climate change, and it all plays out in the Chesapeake. People in a place like Cooperstown, New York, famous for its Baseball Hall of Fame, probably don’t think they are polluting the Chesapeake Bay…but they are.

Out in the boat, it’s obvious every time the fishermen pull up a crab pot. It is usually full of sea grass. That won’t sound serious to you if, like me, you darned near flunked out of college because of the science courses that were prerequisites to graduation. But it is more than serious; it is catastrophic. Because thanks to the nitrogen flowing into the Chesapeake — basically it is fertilizer — the sea grass, the algae, is growing like kudzu in the South, a mutant that multiplies without cessation. And what it does is, it sucks up all the oxygen from the water. Two weeks ago we started our shoot on the Chesapeake (I went home in between), and went out with a biologist who had an instrument that actually measures oxygen content in water. As he dropped it off his Boston Whaler (I’m just so into boats), we watched the onboard meter’s measure of the oxygen get lower and lower and lower. That’s what they call a “dead zone” in which seafood cannot survive. An organization called the Chesapeake Bay Foundation estimates that forty percent of the bay is now a dead zone. As the foundation’s CEO characterized it, imagine if someone sealed off forty percent of your home and sucked out all the oxygen.

The crime is, they’ve seen this coming for many years. I interviewed a former Maryland governor named Harry Hughes, who ran the state a quarter century ago, and worked for a compact with neighboring states (and Washington DC on the Potomac, which empties into the Chesapeake). He is sick that now it is 25 years later and they’re still talking about the same crisis: pollutants pouring in, seafood populations declining, the industry of fishermen contracting. The fishermen themselves are partly to blame; they have taken out as many crabs and oysters over the years as they could (and oysters by the millions are natural filters that remove nitrogen from the water), although one might blame state and federal agencies for failing to impose sensible management of fishermen’s catches.

By the way, they’re not “fishermen;” they are “watermen,” and you should call them nothing else. They have been “watermen” since men first went on the water. And while we’re into definitions, the “crab pot” I mentioned earlier is nothing like the pot you’re probably picturing; a crab pot is a squarish chicken-wire cage (or, these days, a lot of them use vinyl), two to three feet across in each cubic direction. There are fluted holes on each of four sides into which the crabs crawl to get at the clams that are put in a round mug-shaped wire enclosure within the cage. It’s a little more intricate than that, but you get the idea. Some of the watermen have four, five, six hundred of these in the bay at a time— although spread around in vastly different parts of the water, identified only by the owner’s color-coded floating buoy. There are small factories in the area that manufacture these cages, but some watermen buy rolls of chicken-wire and make the contraptions themselves.

For our trip yesterday out to the middle of the bay, we met our waterman, Eddie Evans, at five in the morning on his dock. We saw another couple of crab boats putt-putting by, just getting going at the start of the season, their running lights defining their movement and their decks piled high in the silhouette of the pre-dawn light with crab pots, like containers on an ocean-going freighter. Eddie and his “mate,” also named Eddie, didn’t have to load any crab pots onto their deck though; they already are all in the water. But they had to load the clams— about sixty pounds of them— and the thin wooden one-bushel baskets into which the crabs would be tossed as they came falling out of the cages. It was still dark as Eddie started up his engine and with running lights to find us and buoys to guide us, off we went for the first line of pots, about 45 minutes from home.

Too bad for the sound man on the camera crew. He didn’t make it to the first line of pots. We were sitting in the pilot cabin, talking with Eddie Evans, when the sound man said to me, “I’m not sure I’m gonna keep my breakfast til we get back to port.” He barely kept it til the end of his sentence. I’m not sure whether he knew that we would be out on the water in this small boat on these two-foot swells for between six and seven hours. But I knew. So about a half hour later when he was as white as a sheet—the man is African-American— and he asked me in a voice that defined death itself, “How much longer?”, I didn’t have the heart to tell him. So I lied. “An hour, maybe a few minutes more.” If you’ve ever been seasick, you know that if anyone were to offer you a painless albeit permanent end to your suffering, you’d probably take it. What scared me was, hearing the truth would drive him to throw himself overboard while the cameraman and I were paying attention to the watermen harvesting their crabs.

Eventually, but thankfully only about thirty minutes before we headed back to port, the cameraman lost it too. But I almost expected it and here’s why. Many years ago, I was with a cameraman in a small aircraft in a rough sky doing tight circles over ships stuck in the English Channel; the story was a longshoreman’s strike that had stranded a lot of big vessels and perishable cargoes. I wanted shots of lots of ships up close, so that I could get back to land and check on their cargoes and say on the air that night, “And this ship, the so-and-so, has a load of pineapples that will rot if this strike is not settled.” Well, at a certain point I told the cameraman that I thought we had enough. He kept his eye on the eyepiece and asked, “Are you sure?” I said “Yes,” but he asked again, “Absolutely sure?” I said “Yes” and he took his eye off the eyepiece and placed the camera on the seat next to him and pulled the barf bag from the seat pocket and gave back every morsel of food he had consumed for a week. His equilibrium— his horizon— had been defined by what he saw through the eyepiece. When he finally removed it, everything changed…as he knew it would.

Personally, I used to get seasick in a bathtub. Maybe that’s an exaggeration— maybe— but as an example of my vulnerability to motion, Carol and I once were on a picnic on the back of a friend’s boat docked on Lake Michigan in Chicago on a flawlessly calm day… and I still got sick. I have overcome it, and while I can’t say for sure why, I do know when. It was in 1983, and we were doing a story (for ABC) about a member of the Danish parliament who was a professional ocean-going fisherman and was intent on challenging some EEC rules about how far you could fish from another nation’s shores. So we went to the northern tip of Denmark — did I mention, this was in December? — from which he and his crew would set out for the waters off Great Britain. We’re talking the North Sea, icy weather, twenty-hour nights and four-hour days.

For our first two days in the north of Denmark, the gale force winds were so fierce that we couldn’t even launch. So that on the third day, when they told us we finally were going the next morning, meaning three o’clock the next morning, I figured summer weather must be right around the corner. Wrong! The seas had gone from Gale Force 4 to Gale Force 2, and for your garden-variety ocean-going fishing boat, that’s no worse than the weather that makes you fasten your seatbelt on an airplane.

But the beauty of the situation was, when we got on the boat it was dark. When we pulled out of harbor it was dark. And for the first six or seven hours of this voyage from hell, it was dark. So when finally we got our brief glimpse of daylight, my body had acclimated to the movement. Although yesterday on the Chesapeake I kept looking at the horizon to keep my stable bearings, I’ve always thought that having no horizon for those first perilous hours on the North Sea was what kept me healthy. In fact the only discomfort during the whole three days on the water was when a helicopter dropped a harness to haul me off the tail of the boat to get back to London and edit the story, and I did something wrong as the guy in the chopper gave me a signal to jump and instead of instantly rising toward the hovering helicopter, I took a quick dip in the cold high waves of the North Sea. There are better ways to get off boats.

But back to yesterday’s boat. What I didn’t tell you about Eddie Evans is, he is 70. And he’s been doing this since he was 11. His father did it before him, and his grandfather before that, and if you want to hear the whole story, Eddie is the eighth generation of his family to be a waterman, and his son and grandson already are doing the same work. And it is hard work! I was exhausted by the time we got off the boat simply from constantly and relentlessly shifting my weight and finding my balance to keep from falling onto the deck or over the edge. For six and a half hours they’re doing the same thing, but all the while pulling these crab pots up from fifty feet down in the mud, and setting them on a metal platform on the starboard edge of the stern, and extracting the live crabs and replacing the clam bait and removing the sea grass and replacing the crab pot in the water. The moment one pot goes back in, another starts coming up. For hundreds of pots a day.

It’s interesting to see them sort the crabs. Right there on the boat, in movements so swift I hardly had time to follow the action, they sort them into three groups: large males, small males, and females. If you’re wondering, how can they tell, and you really want to know, under the hard belly of each crab there’s a reproductive organ covered by a complex perforation in the shell with a particular shape, and without getting too graphic, it is not unlike the shape of its human counterpart. The large males, appealing to high-end seafood restaurants, are the best catch: they bring in $65 a bushel, which is roughly the volumetric equivalent of a suitcase. That’s a lot of crab. The small males, for the lower-end restaurants, are worth $40 a bushel. The females — sorry, ladies — only bring $20 a bushel. That’s what goes into crab cakes and crab meat. Sexual discrimination is alive and well with the watermen.

But the crabs don’t want to be sorted. Some try scrambling away from the mate’s thickly gloved hands, and some grab other crabs with their pinchers, which the mate then has to separate. He doesn’t do it gently. The sad thing about the segment we’re producing is, the watermen are something like the crabs. At a certain point, their fate is out of their control. If someone in Cooperstown, New York, uses fertilizer on his lawn, ultimately it ends up in the Chesapeake Bay, one more nail in the coffin of the watermen.

There are watermen in many parts of the Chesapeake, but we chose a population that lives in isolation. They come from a place called Smith Island, a 45-minute ferry ride from the mainland of Maryland’s Eastern Shore. It is absolutely a step back in time. You look at the gravestones in the church cemetery and three quarters of the deceased have only three different surnames: Evans, Tyler, and Dize. There are some cars and trucks on the island although I’m not sure why; the most distant destination is only a mile and a half away. Mostly, people get around on golf cart types of vehicles, or on simple no-gear bikes. That’s all I did. What a great way to commute! Once kids reach 8th grade, they take that 45-minute ferry ride each day both to and from their school on the mainland. And then there’s the people’s language. It’s English, of course, but in some cases, English you’d be hard put to understand. I am no good at describing the characteristics of dialects, but suffice to say that I went into the one island café/store Friday afternoon and sat at a table listening to two men conversing at the next table and they might as well have been speaking Arabic. I barely understood a word. It is a culture that is unique to Smith Island, but with the seafood declining, so too is the young population of the island. Eddie Evans’ grandson might be the last waterman in the family line.

Now, a few words about the space shuttle. I wish every one of you could witness a launch, because it is awesome to see — and hear, and feel — the power. I already wrote about the 18-story building lifting off from a dead stop. The other amazing thing is, when it comes home, having traveled a few million miles, it lands like an airplane on an airstrip not five miles from where it blasted off. On my last leg getting here late last night, I calculated that in the time it took me to leave Smith Island on the ferry, then drive to Dulles Airport in Washington, then fly to Florida and finally drive again, from Orlando to Cape Canaveral, the astronauts who launch tomorrow will orbit the earth six times.

But it’s not the speed, or the power of the space shuttle that makes it amazing. It’s the step it represents in the ongoing exploration of space. I know a lot of people who think it’s all a colossal waste of money. I understand what they think because I used to think the same thing. But since I began anchoring shuttle launches from here four years ago, I’ve become a “home boy” for the space program. Not just because I cover it, but because I’ve talked with so many scientists and astronauts and learned so much more about it.

I argue, there are two reasons we do what we do in space. One is for the spin-offs. I don’t mean Tang, although for a while there, Tang was pretty neat. And I don’t mean the Dust Buster, although when NASA needed a device for astronauts to collect moon dust, Black & Decker developed a small vacuum, and out of that came the tool many of us have in our homes. But there are so many more things that benefit all of us today. Polarized sunglasses are a byproduct of NASA’s appeal to Foster Grant to create protective visors for the men who walked on the moon, then the astronauts who still walk in space. Modern insulation comes from the need to protect human beings from the extreme temperature fluctuations in space. The shock-absorbing soles in athletic shoes were developed for man to walk on the moon.

Infrared cameras, fire retardant materials, acoustical sound absorption, tiny heart pumps, even the materials used in the newest prosthetic limbs— they come from the development of foam for the space shuttle’s external fuel tank. And did I mention the microchips that enable everything from our computers to our cell phones? Or the GPS technology that not only finds us restaurants in strange cities but finds cell phones so they can receive calls from halfway across town or halfway across the world. Not to mention medical research in zero-G, a chance to see things without the crushing impact of gravity. Understanding sand and soil in zero-G can help us understand the ground under our feet, and build structures more resistant to collapse. Growing and studying experimental tumors in zero-G, seeing every dimension of a human cell, can facilitate the treatment of devastating tumors in the human body.

The other argument is about being a pioneer. In the history of great nations, there has always been a push to be pioneers. At first it was with armies, then sailing ships, now space. Think about the sailing ships: they brought Europeans tea and spices and fabrics previously unknown on their side of the planet. Who knows what we’ll pick up when we venture even further in space? And I argue, if we don’t do it, someone else will. It is a slow process, and I don’t think the benefits are evident in the evolution of the shuttle and the construction of the International Space Station. But it took the shuttle to build the station, and it takes the station to test the methods man will use to push deeper into the cosmos…as well as testing his endurance.

Tomorrow’s launch is, in a way, unique. Rather than heading up to help complete the build-out of the space station, Atlantis is going instead to the Hubble Space Telescope. With the shuttle program due to end toward the end of next year to free up money to build the next generation of spacecraft, this will be Hubble’s last human house call. They’re going to replace some instruments and repair others, to give Hubble about five more years of life. Why? Because it has been a treasure for the science of astronomy. We know things about the age of the universe that we didn’t know before, not to mention its composition. And we have seen mosaics from Hubble that blow the mind. In a piece I’ll have on our program World Report Tuesday night, I’m using a shot that captures light from thirteen billion light years away, and shows something like ten thousand galaxies far beyond ours. And another shot roughly three hundred light years across, with solar systems twenty times the size of ours. It’s a lot of money, but it’s a lot of information, and a lot of bling. Galileo would love it.

About half the time when I’ve finished my work here, I choose an off-the-beaten-path route to get back to my hotel in Cocoa Beach; it takes me from the Kennedy Space Center through the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station along its southern border. And some of those times, I’ve stopped at the site on the Air Force station from which Alan Shepard blasted off. A full scale Redstone rocket with a Mercury capsule atop it marks the spot. It is humbling. Not just because that proud day when the first American reached space wasn’t all that long ago— not even fifty years— but because the rocket that carried him 116 miles into the sky before he tumbled back down sixteen minutes later into the Atlantic wasn’t much bigger than a modern RV. All stacked up, it was only 70 feet high, just six feet across, and it didn’t weigh three tons.

That’s a far cry from the space shuttle. It rises from our planet on five hundred feet of flame, streaming from the nozzles as hot as the surface of the sun. By the time it clears the tower, the shuttle is already going a hundred miles per hour. Within a minute it’s going a thousand, and after eight and a half minutes, its speed is 17,000 mph as it goes ‘round the earth usually between 150 and 200 times. The thing is, we’re so accustomed these days to technological advances in space and elsewhere that none of that even sounds astonishing any more. And yet it is. Especially when you recall the late author Stephen Ambrose’s observation that until a steam engine was put on steel rails just a little more than two hundred years ago, man had never moved faster than the speed of a galloping horse!

My first reaction the first time I gazed at the puny rocket at Shepard’s launch pad was, I wouldn’t get up on that thing even if it were at an amusement park and I knew it wasn’t going anywhere. My second reaction was to pull out my cell phone and call a friend of Carol’s and mine in Evergreen, Laura, who happens to be one of Alan Shepard’s three daughters. When I told her where I was, she choked up. So did I. It wasn’t that long ago, yet some of those men with “the right stuff” might not recognize the world we now inhabit. Nor the rockets we fly.

And it reminded me of what she had told me in a documentary I was producing at the time about space flight. When her late father was selected to become the first American in space, she asked him how it would all work, and he told her, “They will put me in a capsule, put me on top of a rocket, blast me into space, and I will come home safely.” She then said with a laugh, “So we told him to have a good trip.”

The fact is, they put him in that capsule up on top of that rocket with a cherry picker. And the launch director crouched behind a roofless six foot high cinderblock wall maybe sixty feet from the tail of the Redstone rocket, periodically peeking out to see if the flame looked hot enough to ignite (the launch director when the shuttle blasts off has to be out where we are, three miles away). We’ve come a long way since then, yet at this point in history, America has still staged just 156 manned flights; tomorrow should be 157. And it still comes down to strapping men and women into rockets, and firing them off into space.

You can argue that the money we spend to stay in space could be better spent here on earth, although in the interest of man’s quest for knowledge and exploration, I would also argue otherwise. Anyway, if we shut the space program down tomorrow, the money wouldn’t automatically gravitate to healthcare or housing or higher wages; it just doesn’t work that way.

For me, there is something stirring about seeing man stretch his resources, and his intellect, and his courage, to the limit. Everything from the calculations that guide spaceflight to the power that ignites it are still almost inconceivable. As is our whole future in space, which I believe is good reason to keep going, not good reason to stop. Late last year I interviewed Michael Griffin, who until January was the Administrator of NASA. He gave me a quote that has stuck with me: “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be research.” And Alan Shepard’s daughter Laura made the same point, just differently, for that documentary: “We don’t know what’s out there unless we go.”

Out there on launch pad 39-A right now, I can see more than just Atlantis. Not two miles away, on the other launch pad, 39-B, sits another shuttle poised to launch, Endeavour. Since Atlantis is going to Hubble, it won’t have the safe haven of the space station if something goes wrong, like being struck by debris during launch the way the ill-fated Columbia was, or by debris in space. Atlantis simply could not reach the orbit of the well-stocked space station from the orbit of Hubble, and its stranded astronauts wouldn’t have more than two and a half or three weeks of consumables like food and water and oxygen to support them. So NASA has worked out a risky, never-tried-before, life-or-death rescue plan which everyone here hopes they won’t have to try: it would have Endeavour taking off, stripped down and with a crew of just four, exactly a week after Atlantis. The two ships would rendezvous in space, 350 miles above us, but since they weren’t built to mate, they would only meet at a distance of about fifty feet. Endeavour would grapple Atlantis with its robotic arm (and consider what could happen if it nudges it a bit too hard in the zero gravity environment of space), and the astronauts would begin an incredibly complex choreography of transfers from one ship to another along a tether (because with spatial limitations, Endeavour can bring up only three pressurized space suits), from one orbiter to another, across the void of space.

I hope the Atlantis astronauts get off the ground tomorrow, and twelve days later, safely return. Without Endeavour’s help. I hope your days are just as good.

Greg

Unlike my other letters, this one isn’t about a trip. It’s more about an experience. An experience I had a long time ago — forty years, to be exact. But it’s relevant to the death only a little more than a week ago of a man who most of you probably have heard about; in fact some might not only have heard about him, but you probably have actually heard him.

Paul Harvey. For a couple of years, starting in the late 1960s, I was Paul Harvey’s editor. When he died on the 1st of March, I had emails from a couple of friends asking me for a memory or two of Paul, and then my brother Stephen suggested that I write something about my personal experiences with this icon of American broadcasting. I’m on an airplane to Florida right now to anchor a space shuttle launch for HDNet, and I’ve got a couple of hours to kill, so here it comes. If you find this boring … blame Stephen.

Although he was the biggest voice in American radio until Rush Limbaugh came along, Paul was in actuality just an employee. He worked for ABC News, which is where I got my own start in his shadow. My job as his editor in Chicago, where he lived and from which he broadcast most of the time, was mainly to keep him honest: to make sure that from the reams of wire copy through which he pored every day, he accurately reflected the facts of each story he wrote.

Note the words, “He wrote.” People used to ask me if I wrote for Paul Harvey; I always responded that I wrote his pauses (he was famous for those pregnant pauses). But the fact is, for the two newscasts we produced every day — a five-minute show at 7:30 in the morning and the other, a 15-minute newscast at 10:30 — he wrote every word. That may not sound like rocket science but it is a lot of writing, particularly when the quality of the writing, the clarity of the language, the impact of the story, must be high.

His was. One of the things I admired about Paul Harvey’s communication skills was his ability to take some macro-concept and boil it down to each microcosm, which means each of us. For example, if he were telling the story of the latest figures for the Gross Domestic Product, he wouldn’t say, “The Commerce Department says it’s one trillion dollars.” No, he’d more likely say something like, “According to the latest figures from the Commerce Department, each of us last year, every man, woman, and child in this nation produced four thousand dollars worth of goods.”

An even better example is one of the famous tales told about Paul Harvey’s unique and resourceful approach to broadcast journalism. There was a story about a guy who tried to fly with a gizmo he built. Paul’s piece went something like this: “Joe Smith of Someplace USA thought if he built big wings out of stiff fabric and strapped them to his body and jumped from a cliff, he could fly. Joe Smith was 42.” Who needs more?!

My days with Paul Harvey were of course pre-internet and pre-computer. What this means is, everything was pounded out on a typewriter. You older readers will remember carbon paper (you older readers will remember a typewriter!); Paul would put two sheets of newsprint together with carbon paper in between, then write a couple of lines, then pull the sheets out from the typewriter carriage and remove the carbon paper and sort the written pages into two piles — one for him, one for me. So if the story read, “An airplane crashed today in Pittsburgh. At least 40 people died,” those would be the words typed out on the page.

The thing is, maybe new facts would come in, or maybe he’d just decide to add something he already knew, but if he wanted to add a new line to the story — maybe something like, “The pilot survived and investigators already are talking to him in the hospital” — rather than retype the whole story on a new set of carbons so it would all be on one page, he’d insert two new sheets with carbon in between and type out the new line about the pilot who survived, in effect adding a second page to the story. The result by show time? The story could end up being only six or seven sentences long, but typed on four or five different pages, then sorted in the right order to be delivered in its proper sequence on the air.

My job was to read through that, and already having thoroughly read every word on the wires that Paul might just have quickly scanned, to correct the errors he sometimes made. We had eight wire machines in the office spitting out paper faster than you could read it, so we both had a lot of words to go through to get it right.

Once the show was written and it was air time, Paul went into the studio and sat before a very big table surface, laying out his script in about a dozen different piles that would permit him to deliver his items in the most entertaining, rather than the most logical, order; since he was a master at judging not just how something looked on the printed page but how it sounded to the listener’s ear, sometimes he’d mix things up midway through the broadcast….which brings me back to his piles.

While Paul was on the air, my job was to diligently watch the wires and if there was a breaking story that was either new or somehow affected what Paul already had written, I had to write it up (yes, I did get to write a few things like that, in the style he’d have used) and rush it into his studio and put it right in front of his face, usually to take precedence over any other pile still before him.

That all went well until one day when a huge story broke (although I no longer remember what), and in my haste to get my new page in front of Paul, my hand accidentally swept several piles off the table and onto the floor. For any other broadcaster that would have been a disaster. But not for Paul Harvey. Between the odd and random order of stories he chose, and the pregnant pauses for which he was so well known, the audience never knew the difference. He kept reading, I knelt and found coherent pages and handed them up to him, and then he kept reading, and then I kept handing him more. That newscast was as good as any other.

Here’s another story which isn’t really about Paul Harvey but it happened on his watch and might have been the closest my career ever came to ending before it really got started: it’s about the near-death of Apollo 13 and the three astronauts on board. We both knew that an announcement was imminent that would tell us whether Apollo 13 would survive, and it was due to come during the last few minutes of our 15-minute show. So Paul simply stressed to me the importance of getting that announcement in his hands and on the air— even if it came so late that I literally had to rip it off the printer so he could read it as written by the wire service— before he ended the broadcast with his signature “Good Day.” And as we expected, the alarm bells on our wire machines all started going off just minutes before Paul would sign off. So I stood in front of the most urgent wire machine and watched as the keys quickly typed out something like this: “The Apollo 13 capsule, with astronauts “A,” “B,” and “C” aboard, will not be able to reenter the earth’s atmosphere and instead will burn up on reentry, killing the three men onboard…” At which point, with the second hand ticking away, I came as close as I could possibly be to ripping it off and just running it in to him, when some little cautionary bell went off in my head and said, “Wait for a few more words.” Thank goodness I did, because the next few words were something like, “IF such-and-such happens…” It didn’t.

As I said, except for the late breaking items, I really never did write a word for Paul’s daily newscasts, but eventually he trusted me enough to allow me write some of the early versions of his popular feature called “The Rest of the Story” (which he owned, not ABC). It was an interesting challenge because it had to sound like his voice, which meant I’d have to write in his simple and staccato style. Anyone who ever heard Paul on the radio knows what I mean by “staccato,” but here’s what I mean by “simple.” If someone was killed in an auto accident, he would never write, “The accident took the life of Jane Doe….” which is how you’ll often hear it from other professional broadcasters. No, he would write it the simple way: “The accident killed Jane Doe….” which is how we’d say it in real life. To the degree that I learned to write well enough to make a living at it (quell your laughter), I credit much of it to Paul Harvey, and my obligation to copy his style.

And here’s something else that serves as a tribute to this man who taught me a lot. I was just a rookie when I went to work as his editor, fresh out of graduate school. He already was influential and important and popular and famous, and he didn’t need a kid in his twenties telling him what, let alone how, to write. But he let me anyway. He usually had some commentary in his 15-minute newscast (which was in fact part of the durable name of his show, “Paul Harvey News & Comment”), and eventually, he’d ask my opinion of what he’d written. I was afraid at first to be blunt (I mean, the guy not only was a major broadcast voice but he was as old as my own father), but he inferred that and told me not to worry, to tell him what I thought. So I did. Sometimes he’d hear me out, then gently explain that he respected my point of view but didn’t agree — Paul was an old-fashioned conservative and I sure wasn’t — but sometimes, to this man’s enormous credit, he’d listen to what I thought, and actually change what he wrote.

The best example? A simple one, and not at all political. There were two different stories on the wires one day. One story said, the height of miniskirts was going up (meaning, skirts were getting shorter). The other said, the rate of rapes was going up. The stories weren’t connected, but Paul decided they must be and wrote a commentary that really dealt with a growing sense of decadence in our country but ended up attributing the rise in the rape rate to the rise in the height of the miniskirt. I didn’t even have to lay out a line of logic to him; I just told him I thought that was absurd. He kind of laughed, said I was probably right, and changed it.

That flexibility also applied to grammar. As good as he was, his grammar had gotten sloppy. For instance, reporting a death. If someone was 90 years old and passed away, he might say “She died at 90.” I started telling him, “90 is not a place where people die. They might die at home, or at the hospital, but they don’t die at 90.” Instead, I’d tell him, “You should say something like, “She died. She was 90.” Likewise, his language was riddled with split infinitives (“He was already going to the racetrack” splits the verb “was going;” the grammatically correct version would be “He already was going to the racetrack,” or, “Already he was going to the racetrack.”). Once he gave me leeway to feel confident in our relationship, I started pointing it out to him.

Sure enough, he began to change his ways. He used to tell me how grateful he was to have a young whippersnapper like me to take him back to proper English … until one day when he came into the office with his script and sat down and said he was going back to his old ways. Why? Because while proper grammar was proper grammar, it wasn’t how people actually talked! Who knew that better than him? (Mind you, this is a bit of the pot calling the kettle black. I just looked back at what I’ve written and found this sinful split infinitive: “…. but you probably have actually heard him.”) And even that last line is grammatically incorrect; it should be, “Who knew that better than he?” But for the grace of Paul go I.

My fondest memory of Paul Harvey’s combination of an open mind and his brilliant use of language is from the day he turned on Richard Nixon. It was some time into the Watergate scandal, when the president who Paul had admired so much was still trying to hold on and, as we now know, not being honest with the American people on what he knew about Watergate. Paul began a commentary with these words: “Mr. Nixon, I love you … but you’re wrong.” If that didn’t say it all, nothing did.

Paul himself “died at 90.” And until his wife preceded him and he fell ill more often than he stayed healthy, Paul still kept the rigorous schedule he’d always kept. If I didn’t get to the office in Chicago by 4:30 in the morning, he’d beat me there. The difference is, when my “shift” was over, I’d go home. On the other hand, one or two days a week he’d finish the second newscast, then leave the office and go to the airport and fly somewhere else in the country — St. Louis, Cleveland, Nashville, Denver, Oklahoma City — to make a dinner-hour speech before some large group, then he’d get back on a plane and fly home and be at his desk the next morning at 4:30.

One day, when Paul looked particularly tired but had his coat and hat on and was carrying the briefcase he took on his travels, which was different than the one he brought in when he wasn’t going away, I asked him why he did it. It couldn’t be for the money; he already was the best paid broadcaster in radio. And it wasn’t for the frequent flyer miles; they didn’t have those back then. His answer was something like this: “When you walk into a banquet hall full of people who rise and applaud when you’re introduced, it’s hard to give that up.” He was, among other things, honest.

When Rush Limbaugh dies, there will be those who weep, but other Americans will at least silently think if not publicly declare, “Good riddance.” Not so for Paul Harvey. He had a way of reaching across divides. Not every day, not on every story. But he was a good guy who respected what other people thought and did a sensational job, without being insulting or myopic, of letting us know what he thought.

He helped shape what you hear today. The good parts.

Greg

I remember, by the way, the stories in that AARP magazine – about burial insurance and finding places to dump RV waste. Certainly nothing of interest to us.

During the intervening nine and one-half years online, BoomerCafé has shared hundreds of stories written by baby boomers with active lifestyles, and our audience has grown. We’ve learned a lot about the boomer generation and have become experts, I suppose. Baby boomers are a diverse and independent crowd but share a common trait of being suspicious of anything “pushed” at them. Baby boomers are also America’s most affluent group. But, you’ve got to win their respect to get their support.

AARP and few other organizations have made attempts … but have never quite succeeded at reaching the 77-million baby boomers in America, most likely because they are not subtle at either pushing or winning trust. Neither have marketers.

PR agencies, such as Fleishman and Edelman, have formed small groups in an attempt to connect their clients with boomers but their efforts have been inhibited by their overriding goal of selling more time to their clients rather than genuinely learning how to connect with the baby boomer audience.

Greg and I have, over the years, resisted suggestions to turn BoomerCafé into a site to shill products at baby boomers, even though we are convinced the site would be a unique platform for any pharmaceutical, insurance or retirement company to connect with a sizable boomer audience. For that to happen, however, marketers for those outfits must change their style from pushing to connecting.

I think it’s the hardest thing for any marketer or PR person to comprehend. In today’s world, pushing products and services is far more expensive and far less effective than connecting, listening and engaging audiences in conversation. The latter is today’s style of the Internet Era.

Speaking of the Internet Era, I’ve just finished publishing a book, “The Media Savvy Leader,” and an accompanying ebook with a lot of ideas for leaders and business owners to get a competitive edge in today’s challenging world. The book is available at Amazon.com. The ebook is now available for free download by clicking here.

And, your thoughts and comments about BoomerCafé are always welcome and appreciated. Just click on Comments at the beginning and end of this story.

David Henderson
Co-founder and publisher, BoomerCafé

Vietnam felt personally profound from the very moment I set foot on the land. I’m hardly the first American to come here in the 35-plus years since the war. Plenty of tourists, investors, Vietnam vets have come before me. But as soon as I got off the plane from Hong Kong, I was overcome by a strange, even depressing feeling about what they call here, “the American War.”

From everything you read about this country today, almost nobody’s bitter any more. In fact it’s halfway fair to say that with one of the younger populations on earth— almost two thirds of the people are under 30— most don’t even remember (although, to be sure, there are “War Remnants” museums in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, to remind them).

But still, on that first day after landing in the country, when I looked at workers at the airport, then as my driver carried me fifteen miles into the heart of Hanoi, when I looked at motorists on the road and farmers in the fields and pedestrians on the streets, I couldn’t help but wonder, did the war demolish that man’s house? Or that woman’s father? Or that family’s livelihood? I didn’t fight in Vietnam… and the Americans who did were only doing the job Washington gave them to do… yet I felt a weird sense of guilt.

After all, we didn’t go to war here because we were threatened. Even in the contemporary case of Iraq, although the legitimacy of the menace against us was debatable, lots of Americans did feel threatened. Vietnam was different. Beginning almost fifty years ago, the threat we came here to quell was regional communism, which was seen as an ideological peril to the planet but not a direct and immediate assault on our security. And anyway, we failed. The war in Vietnam ended up as a wasteful misuse of lives and treasure. On both sides.

But evidently the legacy of wasted treasure felt stronger for me than it feels for the Vietnamese I encountered. Here’s an illustration: on our first full day of shooting in Hanoi, I met with two aged veterans who believe they were disabled by Agent Orange; one also has a daughter born “abnormal,” to use his word, 33 years ago. In the partial shade of a half dead tree, I interviewed the two vets, and the one with the “abnormal” daughter told me how he was moving south with his North Vietnamese Army unit through the jungle one day when they heard an airplane overhead, and looked up, and saw white smoke. He didn’t know what it was but it didn’t seem good; he ran for four hours to get away from it. Because many of the men with whom he served now have the same maladies he has, and some also have children born “abnormal,” he believes that the white smoke from American planes was the cause of it. But here’s the thing: as the interview ended, he and his fellow veteran not only warmly welcomed me to this country as a friend, they even invited me back.

Here’s the other part that sticks with me: as we spoke, our “minder” from the Foreign Ministry, standing behind me, was translating. At one point when I asked him to put a particular question to the two vets, he didn’t respond. I turned to look back at him, and he was crying. Serious tears, dripping down his cheeks. After we left, I asked what had moved him. His answer was that these two men had lost so much, and suffered so much because of the war, but were able to speak of it all with a smile. It amazed him, and frankly amazes me, looking back. It moves me too. If I felt any guilt at all for the misery of the war here, it wasn’t them laying it on me.

Sure, there was a small sign or two of distrust when we showed up somewhere, or maybe just doubt about us and our motives. One day in a rural province about three hours from Da Nang, three pencil-thin communal police were waiting for us at the isolated home of a poor woman and her disabled daughter we had gone to see. Having heard that a team from an American television network was coming to visit— people in the province must actually register with the police if they are hosting foreigners— they were there to “protect” the family.

But amicable kindness toward a one-time enemy was the rule. One rainy day in Da Nang (actually, it is monsoon season so every day was a rainy day in Da Nang), we were shooting in a poor busy marketplace. Everyone at whom we pointed our camera — or whose path we blocked in the narrow cluttered alleyway to get our shots— was perfectly friendly; nothing but waves and smiles. Eventually, three little old guys without a full set of teeth between them motioned for me to come over and have my picture taken with them. So I asked Paul, the cameraman with me, to shoot it. There we are, a video postcard, these guys old enough to be war veterans flanking me with broad grins and one of them playfully holding his hands in a “V” for victory sign in front of my face. We all had a good laugh.

If that doesn’t seem so remarkable, consider the fact that today, more than sixty years after World War Two, there is still conscious anger towards Japan for the atrocities it committed in places like China and Korea. During the war here, many Vietnamese didn’t think the conduct of the United States was any less atrocious (although, of course, the feeling from our side toward them was mutual). One man told me, for instance, that the most horrifying thing about “the American War” wasn’t the villages we invaded or the chemicals we sprayed; it was the bombs we dropped from B-52s. He explained that their arrival was always a surprise and their devastation was total. From wars I’ve covered I understand the surprise part; since the sound of an aircraft’s engine is pushed to the rear, you don’t know a warplane is headed toward you until it has passed. The boom from the bombs thereafter rudely underscores the announcement.

So, maybe as I came into this country and felt depressed, I was having my “ain’t war a shame” moment. God knows, in my work I’ve seen plenty of wars, and plenty of destruction, and plenty of victims, and while I don’t think all wars are bad, I do think many are futile. Considering the American cost of the war here, especially since the enemy came out on top, this one was.

As I recognized all this though, I also wondered if the Vietnamese who are still around from the war feel the same kind of guilt for their own conduct when they see Americans.

However, in society at large, there is only one issue from the war still outstanding, one legacy in the eyes of the Vietnamese that can’t yet be forgotten, at least not in those areas where our forces loaded and launched aircraft with Agent Orange, or where it was actually sprayed.

An example of that legacy, in their eyes anyway, is an impoverished woman I went to meet at a meager house in Da Nang named Kieu, age 38. She was born with badly mangled legs and also now has cancer. She explained to me how she has lived in this house since she was born, and how all her life she drank water from the well behind her dirt-poor dwelling. The trouble is, it was fed by the runoff from the former U.S. airbase there, the main launching point for aircraft heading out to spray Agent Orange. It is not a thousand feet from the house. Now, her husband has left, she’s no longer strong enough to earn, believe it or not, the nine bucks a month she used to earn, and soon her ten-year-old daughter will be an orphan. As she’s holding her daughter on her lap and telling me the story, she’s crying, the girl’s crying, the translator’s crying.

Or Phuong, a 28-year-old man who has a grotesque stump protruding from his chest in which most of his organs are compressed. He weighs 44 pounds and stands not quite 39 inches tall… although he doesn’t really “stand” much at all, because his knees are equally deformed and his calves are unnaturally thin. His pain is ceaseless. His parents lived in a part of the country that was heavily sprayed.

Maybe you know something, or at least remember about Agent Orange. Maybe not.

It was named for the color-coded barrels in which it was stored. We sprayed it to defoliate the jungle and reveal the enemy as he snuck south, but as it turns out, Agent Orange didn’t stop the enemy, and more devastating, it didn’t just kill the trees.

That’s because one element of Agent Orange is dioxin, which is classified by some as the most toxic chemical compound known to man. Scientists will tell you that dioxin can cause horrific birth defects, severe retardation, deadly cancers. Vietnam says that because of the dioxin we sprayed (allegedly on more than ten percent of their country), there are about three million people here who awaken each day with damaged bodies and damaged brains. In some cases, because they have lived in an area that was sprayed and contaminated during the war. Or because they have lived near the airbases from which the planes took off. Or because they were born to parents exposed to Agent Orange during the ten years we used it— like the abnormal daughter of the veteran in Hanoi. What scientists can’t necessarily tell you though is which defects, which deformities, and which cancers are attributable to dioxin, and which ones aren’t. Dioxin sometimes does its damage, then disappears from the bloodstream.

The documentary we came to shoot for HDNet is about all this. And what the United States is, or isn’t, doing to mitigate the problem. The bottom line of the story is that while we left the battle more than 35 years ago, daily life for many people is still a battle, and Vietnam blames it on us.

Like a 13-year-old girl we saw, whose monstrous head is literally as wide as her shoulders; the condition is called hydrocephalus. Or a six-year-old who simply has no eyes. Or another, age 8, whose huge eyeballs are literally halfway out of their sockets; she too is blind. Or a 5-year-old boy with smiling eyes but the lower half of his face grotesquely deformed. Or a 13-year-old whose skin looks like it was burned top to bottom… but it wasn’t. Or a pair of children whose arms are so withered and their legs so twisted that they eat with their feet. Or a dozen other children with skeletally thin mangled limbs, their hands and feet incompletely formed at birth, fused like claws to render them useless.

We met these children, and more I haven’t even bothered to describe, at a special ward at the main hospital in Ho Chi Minh City. Some have parents who visit. Others were dumped there and forgotten and now, no one comes. After three previous stops further north in Vietnam, we thought we had seen the worst of it. We hadn’t. Meeting these children was horrifying. If they are victims of Agent Orange, they are the third generation.

The ward director, a kindly 65-year-old English-speaking doctor originally trained as an OBGYN, explained genuinely that they can’t trace all these birth defects to dioxin, but pointed out that almost two thirds of these kids come from “Agent Orange hotspots,” which both Vietnam and the U.S. now designate as either former American airbases where aircraft were loaded with the herbicide, or parts of the country where spraying was frequent and concentrated. It makes things seem pretty obvious. When I walked through the ward with the director, she picked up the little girl with no eyes and began to cry hard herself. She told me through her tears, “We can’t do anything for her. Anything.”

Thanks to a persistent producer named Kira who’s been working on this all year, we got onto the airbase at Da Nang. This was no small thing; we are the first western journalists ever allowed in since the U.S. pulled out. From the standpoint of our story, it’s what I’d call Ground Zero. This is where Agent Orange was stored, and mixed, and loaded onto planes, then where the barrels that held it and the planes that dropped it were washed off after missions, evidently without much awareness about the long term effects of the residue.

We got to go to three different sections: first, I walked around the part of the tarmac where the barrels were used; from the sloping concrete, the residue poured into a canal… and probably from there it infected the food chain. Second, we paced an expanse of cracked discolored earth where empty barrels finally were discarded, and to this day there’s hardly a blade of grass growing; you can easily see how the residue would seep down into the groundwater. (Did I give my shoes a good washing that night? You better believe it!) Finally, we stepped through a couple of hundred yards of swamp to a lake, called Lotus Lake, in which people actually fished until only a couple of years ago when tests showed it was toxic with dioxin.

This is not the only “hotspot” in the country; there are several. The Vietnamese attribute many of their cancers and birth defects to them, because where there’s a hotspot, everything in the area— fish, plants, poultry, meat, or the water itself— evidently was contaminated. Now there’s a guard tower at the edge of Lotus Lake, manned 24/7, to keep people away. But if Agent Orange is the culprit, it’s too late for some.

We met two more of them out in the countryside, but this time, with tragedy came triumph. We were taken to Quang Nhai province, one of the most heavily sprayed spots during the war. We went to two farm homes, reaching one of them only by trudging on foot down a long muddy jungle road that our van couldn’t negotiate, sharing space with water buffalo and toothless barefoot old women and little old men who looked like Ho Chi Minh. On either side, peasants were knee deep in water, working the rice paddies out in the distance. Our Vietnamese escorts were from a foundation called East Meets West, which is mostly funded by private U.S. donors, many of them American veterans of the war. It was created largely (but not only) to help victims of Agent Orange.

At one home we met a 13-year-old girl named Chi, who appears to have cerebral palsy. East Meets West has been providing therapy and tutoring, and has radically changed her life. Eight months ago when they found her, she just lay all day and night on the family’s simple bed in their two room cement home because her illiterate and isolated mother didn’t know she could do more. Now, Chi can lift a spoon of rice to her mouth and roughly voice single syllable words and do simple math with pen and paper and even take slow but certain steps, and that’s the part that was wonderfully dramatic. As we stood watching (with half the commune standing behind us in the muddy little corral, sharing the space with roosters, pigs, and a filthy smelly buffalo), Chi would grip a plastic stool with both hands on the cement porch, conjure up the control to kind of throw it forward and advance it about six inches, then lean hard on the stool and drag her mangled feet those six inches… then do it all again. Each step required about ten seconds to take. But she took it. Each was a huge struggle, but also produced a huge smile.

At the other home in Quang Nhai, we met a 23-year-old named Toan. The foundation funded corrective surgery for legs that were fused together at birth. He also has no left arm. Bizarre as it may sound, the purpose of the surgery was to amputate the legs about six inches below the knees, which obviously seems pretty radical (and I’m not sure it went so well because he lifted a dirty bandage and showed me holes in one stump from which puss is always escaping). But they amputated to allow him to walk on prosthetic legs and as we watched, with the help of a village health worker, he protected his stumps with bandages, attached the prostheses, and stood on a single crutch to take his first step. Then, with a bag slung over his shoulder, he walked with palpable pride all the way down the muddy path away from his home. This time, it was my turn to cry. I later asked and he told me, until he got these artificial legs, he had never stood before. Still, each step produces pain, apparently because the blood in the stumps isn’t circulating and, for good measure, Toan has a cancer at the base of his backbone which presses on the nerves. But from the smile on his face, those hard-won steps also produce supreme satisfaction.

For years now, as our relationship has improved and the war has receded in the minds of many on both sides, Vietnam has pressed the United States to help clean up the mess we made. Not just with compensation, but with enough money to finally contain the spread of dioxin, and eventually remove it from the ecosystem. The thinking is, some problems can’t be fixed— like Chi and Toan and the others we met— but for those that can, we should help.

Yet for years the U.S. has resisted, and here’s why: while the defects we saw seem pretty obvious, they might not be due to dioxin. Cerebral palsy, retardation, hydrocephalus, spina bifida, blindness, twisted limbs— they look the same, whether or not a war has been fought on the land where the victims live. As the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam told me in an interview, we want verifiable scientific proof that the suffering of three million people, whose problems Vietnam blames on us, is really our fault.

Vietnam cannot provide it. All they can show is what the Vietnamese Red Cross points out: that the closer you get to an airbase where Agent Orange was stored and mixed and loaded onto aircraft, the more cases of crippled, cancerous bodies and diminished minds you’ll find. Or they can make the statistical link, as the director did in the children’s ward in Ho Chi Minh City, between birth defects and hotspots.

We still are not accepting legal responsibility for any byproducts of Agent Orange, but we are doing something. We are finally giving Vietnam money for unspecified “humanitarian” help. At the urging of President Bush, Congress appropriated $3 million for both humanitarian aid and chemical mitigation. The Ford Foundation is kicking in even more. It’s only a small start, and it won’t perform miracles; it might not even prevent Agent Orange from infecting a fourth generation of victims. I say that because when I finished my interview with Kieu, the crippled woman now dying from cancer, she hobbled into her rudimentary kitchen to prepare lunch. After filling a pot with good clean bottled water to boil over a fire, she put some greens in a sieve, went behind the house, and washed them with water… from the well.

That’s what our program (scheduled to air in late January) will be about. Agent Orange, and the people in Vietnam who believe it’s responsible for their misfortunes. Do I believe it is? In some cases, no, people’s maladies probably are something that would have happened anyway. But in many cases, absolutely.

Now, let me turn a bit to Vietnam itself, because however hard the subject is, the country is fascinating.

First, food. And let me put it this way. We had some downright great meals— including probably the best sandwich I ever ate at an outdoor corner shop in Ho Chi Minh City. Actually, sandwiches, plural; they were so good, the cameraman and I went back a second time. But most days as we drove from place to place, we stopped midday at what we Americans would call some hole in the wall restaurant, where they’d bring heaping bowls of rice and scrawny pieces of chicken and lettuce and onions and mint. I almost always subscribe to the theory of “what you don’t know won’t hurt you.” But one day outside Hanoi, I went to the toilet behind the kitchen, and because it was occupied, I just stood in the kitchen and watched. I shouldn’t have. Women were squatting, cleaning out dead chickens, on the dirty wet tile floor. I don’t think it would pass the health inspector’s test. Every other questionable restaurant we went to probably is the same.

It reminded me of an experience I once had with a camera crew in Sudan, when an American diplomat reluctantly gave the crew and me a list of the three best places to eat in Khartoum (after first trying to convince us to keep eating in the hotel because there were no “best” places to eat in Khartoum). When the cameraman, who speaks Arabic, told the taxi driver to take the three of us westerners to the first place, the driver looked at the list, then turned to look at us and wagged his finger in the air and said, “La la la la la,” which means “No no no no no.” The cameraman asked us if we wanted to go ahead anyway, and for the sheer adventure of it all, we said yes. When we got to the first place on the list and took one look, the cameraman told the other two of us to stay in the taxi while he’d go check out the kitchen. When he came back, the only thing he said was, “The fish are green.” So we did the same drill when we got to the second place, and the cameraman returned with the same report. Only one place left. What we decided to do was, just take a seat (on the outdoor packed dirt floor) without inspecting the kitchen first. We had a great meal— no utensils, but tasty food— and no illnesses afterwards.

Anyway, I survived the food, and maybe more miraculously, the traffic. Paul, the cameraman, is Australian but lives in Thailand and knows Southeast Asia quite well. So he speaks with authority when he says, no place else has motorbikes like they have in Vietnam. Maybe the best way to draw the picture is, envision a sidewalk at rush hour in New York, jammed with pedestrians. Now, in your mind’s eye, turn all the people into motorbikes. The streets here are that full, and that crowded. Our government escort told us that in this nation of close to 85 million people, there are 25 million motorbikes. When you’re stuck in a traffic jam, the only thing you’re thinking is, thank goodness they’re not all cars.

The motorbikes are a sign of prosperity and by that measure, Vietnam has surely gotten prosperous. But the people will only stay prosperous if they live long enough! There are still lots of bikes on the streets too, and between the bikes and the motorbikes careening in their chaotic choreography (which means going both ways on both sides of every road), you have to weave your way through them everywhere you go.

A special feature of the motorbike culture here is the size of the loads they carry. You’ll see a motorbike with a platform across the back fender, with six full cases of beer or bottled water stacked on top. Or cases of live chickens. Or my favorite, a guy sitting behind the driver holding a piece of glass probably six feet high and four feet wide; pity the adjacent motorbike that doesn’t see it. It’s even more interesting when the driver is balancing loads like this on the motorbike’s diagonal frame between him and the handlebars.

And while in our own country you usually just see a driver on a motorbike, or maybe a driver with one passenger behind him, that’s child’s play in Vietnam. Literally! You’ll see loads of motorbikes with a child up front, standing on the floorboard or sitting on the driver’s lap as he holds the handlebars, with the mother squeezed in against the driver’s back. Even better, and not at all uncommon, add a fourth passenger, a second child, sometimes a very small baby, scrunched between the father’s back and the mother’s chest. That’s four human beings on the seat of one small motorbike. And a few times I saw five.

So the streets of Vietnam are not for the faint of heart. Neither when driving, or walking. My first night in Hanoi, I watched how pedestrians cross the street through nonstop waves of motorbikes and believe it or not, they just step out and let the bikes weave around them. What I mean is, what you don’t do is try to negotiate your way across. Do that and you’re dead. Rather, you just take each step with a wary eye but forward motion. They don’t so much go around you as past you; you’ll literally feel either the wind, or occasionally the very edge of the handlebar, brush by you.

By the way, in Vietnam the law requires helmets and just about everyone seems to observe it; I’m told there are strict fines if they don’t. But there’s something else many wear: masks, to keep the bad air out. Vietnam is in its own version of an industrial revolution, and when you’re growing and mechanizing so fast, one thing (progress) has to be a priority and another (cleanliness) has to go.

That doesn’t mean Vietnam is becoming a mini-America. For one thing, the minimum wage under the Communist government is the equivalent of about $70 a week. The hotel where we stayed in Da Nang paid its employees 80, plus whatever tips they get. But to acquire a qualified and relatively sophisticated staff, the hotel has to provide a few perks I don’t think they do in western hotels. For one thing, nice new shoes because otherwise, just about everyone only has plastic or rubber sandals. For another, fresh shirts. English classes too. But employees at the hotel pay a price for their clean cushy jobs: they’re searched coming in every day to work and anything of value— phones, jewelry, cash— is confiscated until they leave at the end of the shift…after being searched again.

We spent three days at that particular hotel— the longest I stayed anywhere on this long trip. And although at this time last year they had 100% occupancy because the hotel is right on Da Nang’s famous China Beach, right now they’re at just 15%. Russian and European tourists who used to come in droves are staying home. The economy strikes again.

What that meant at the hotel was, it was easy to notice who the other guests were. The whole time I was there, I saw three different youngish (it’s getting to the point where anyone alive looks “youngish” to me) American couples. On the last night there, when we returned from our shoot, I went to my wing of the hotel and stepped through a door that separates it from the stairway. All three couples were out in the hallway… holding brand new adopted Vietnamese babies. Two boys— Brendan and Troy— and one girl newly named Madison. I guess as she gets older in the United States she’ll grow into it.

It turns out all three couples were working with the same adoption agency, and had come about ten days earlier to choose the babies they’d bring into their families. Once they picked up their babies that day, they still had to stay ten days more to get visas to take the babies back to their new homes. But they didn’t seem to mind; you never saw happier people. Or prouder, as if those babies had just come right out of the women’s wombs.

One couple’s room was right next to mine, and their baby, one of the boys, cried all night. Normally that might be irritating (make that “would be irritating”), but I could only rejoice for the new parents and, even more so, the baby. He has a family now. And a hopeful future. Vietnam might be getting better and might be fully recovered from the war… but the U.S. is still a richer, healthier, superior place to grow up.

May your holidays be rich and healthy. And if you own any stock, may it rise as fast as mine had better do!

Greg

I came to Indonesia to shoot a program about water, and once you’re here and you see the way so many people in the world’s fourth most populous country live, (fourth after China, India, and the USA), it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that the water they cook with… and bathe in… and clean their teeth in… and drink… is less than ideal. Less than totally clean; less than totally safe.

But before I tell you about it, I’ll tell you about the one thing that can kill you here even quicker than the water: the roads. A cameraman and I landed on a flight from Malaysia in the grimy teeming industrial city of Palembang, on the island of Sumatra. We were met by our hosts (from the World Bank, with whose water specialists we are working), and immediately boarded two cars for a four-and-a-half hour drive to the northwest, to three rural villages near a small city by the name of Muara Enim.

Do you know how many times in four-and-a-half hours your heart beats? I do. Or in the case of this drive, how many beats it can skip and still be ticking? I think I know that one too.

Words can’t even adequately describe what driving here is like. Because the words stand still on the page, while in reality you never stop moving, weaving sideways and careening forward, all at the same time, while the oncoming traffic is flying in a beeline right towards you. And even if I can describe in writing what happens to you, I know I can’t describe the sheer terror as it’s happening. Indonesia isn’t the first Third World country in which I’ve been driven. But it may be the most frightening.

For starters, when passing another vehicle, you begin from between one and two feet behind it. No kidding. You’re barreling down the road at 50, 60, 70 miles per hour, close enough to spit on the taillights in front of you, then suddenly without any view of the road ahead, your car pulls out to pass. But once you’re out there, no one else gives way and no one slows down. In our long drives to and from Muara Enim, I can say with unexaggerated honesty that I didn’t see anyone give way or slow down. Not oncoming motorbikes, nor busses, nor trucks. Nor the slower vehicles you’re passing, with only a foot or two between them as suddenly someone’s coming at you head-on from the other direction and you need to squeeze back into the line. Nor, to be fair, did we give way ourselves, even once. NOT ONCE.

For the length of the drive it’s a two lane road, and there’s probably not a single straight section longer than a couple of hundred yards. Yet you’ll get behind a slow truck, or a slow line of trucks, and you’ll pull out to pass. The trouble is, when you do, you give the guy ahead of you the idea that he ought to pass whoever’s in front of him, until you’ve got two, three, four vehicles in a row, passing two, three, maybe four others going in the same direction.

The other trouble is, the very same thing is happening with the vehicles racing toward you in the other direction. Which means everyone but the lead vehicle going each way is passing in the blind. Absolutely blind. A curve in the road, the crest of a hill? They mean nothing. These drivers leave themselves a margin the width of a human hair. And sometimes barely even that. I truly believe that here in the world’s most populous Muslim nation, sometimes they think the only margin they need is the good grace of Allah. It’s enough to make your hair curl… which already happens soon enough anyway in this hot and humid climate.

My very worst moment on the drive to Muara Enim came as we started to pass a long convoy of identical dump trucks, maybe twenty of them. It was my worst moment because we had already passed them earlier, in clusters of three, four, sometimes five, each cluster a test of one’s courage. But we made a rest stop and they got ahead of us, so we had to do it again. Be still, my beating heart.

While here, I asked a couple of people to explain the rules of the road to me, but never got much of an understandable answer. Which leaves me to theorize: in our society, we’re taught not to drive dangerously. In this society (and others in the Third World), they’re taught to avoid dangerous drivers… while driving dangerously themselves. If anyone’s got a better guess I’d love to hear it!

Our drives to and from Muara Enim took place by the way in a cheap little Toyota station wagon, with the pickup of a lawn mower; the best it could do was kind of gather momentum. There were a few moments when I’d have given my house for a stronger engine. And just for good measure, when we stopped for gas, the cameraman noticed a thick twig, maybe an eighth of an inch across, apparently stuck to the side of the left rear tire. But it turns out it wasn’t stuck to the side; I bent down and fiddled with it and sure enough, it was being used as a plug, stuck inside a hole!

And I haven’t even mentioned the suicidal motorbike drivers who hug the center of the road and no matter how big the vehicle bearing down on them from behind or how loud his horn, don’t budge. Or the little kids in the countryside who have a dirt shoulder to walk along but instead walk on the already narrow pavement. Or the goats alongside them that could dart out without warning. Or the idle motorbikes that should be parked well away from the asphalt but instead stand atop it.

I also haven’t mentioned that on our drive back from Muara Enim, most of it was at night. In the rain. Dodging motorbikes with no lights. And trucks broken down, just sitting in the dark along the side of the road… but not actually off it. No cones, no lights, no warnings. You can only pray that the driver sees the apparition of a broken truck better than you do. And preferably, before you do too.

This is why, when I go to places like this, I alternate between thinking, “What the hell am I doing here?” and “I can’t believe I get to do this!” If you’re going to do the kind of work I do, sometimes you have to take drives like these (although I think next time I’ll find a good story in, like, Wichita). You also have to accommodate a few other things that might seem pretty unappealing at home.

Like eating. The food’s quite good here, in fact. And plentiful. But when for dinner the first night we went to the best restaurant in Muara Enim with nine-count-em-nine local Indonesian water executives and World Bank officials, I knew I was in trouble when the Indonesians themselves took every glass, every plate, and every utensil in front of them, and thoroughly wiped them down with napkins the way we’d wipe down a sink after guests go home. Then, after taking some local officials’ cues and ordering fried rice with fish, I walked off to the toilet and passed over a muddy and plainly polluted creek from which they catch the fish we’re eating. Wichita’s looking better and better.

Plus, they have a couple of funny habits here. One is, in this country that sits right along the equator, they like to leave their food out all day. Another is, within my experience they are tied with China for serving more things I’ve never seen before than anyplace else I’ve ever been. Or maybe things just look different without refrigeration.

Then, there’s Durian fruit. There was a sign in the room at my one-star hotel in Muara Enim — the best and only in town — which says, “Please, do not bring durian to our hotel.” Pets are okay, but not this fruit. Why not? Because its nickname is “stinky fruit.” Each is about the size of a large pineapple with squishy golf-ball sized chunks inside, and people sell them all along the road. In fact you know when you’re coming up on a Durian fruit stand, even if it’s around a curve, because half a minute before you reach it, you smell it. Why in God’s name these things are popular here (and elsewhere in Southeast Asia) I honestly don’t know, but I was determined to get through this trip without finding out. I failed. When we finished shooting in the first of the three rural villages near Muara Enim, the village chief invited us to sit and enjoy a treat: Durian fruit. It doesn’t taste half as bad as it smells … but that’s kind of like saying, slugs aren’t half as slimy as they look.

To be fair though, later that same day at the end of our shoot in another village, a second village chief took us to the land in front of his house where his wife had set up a little table with dark brown slick-looking slabs of— yes— Durian fruit. But this time it came in a different form: crushed and mixed with a little raw sugar and ground gummy rice. I don’t know why but somehow the sugar and rice mitigate the Durian. In fact it was one of the tastier things I’ve had here.

Then, there’s rice itself. I can only say, I sure hope it’s good for you. Lots and lots of rice. Because it’s not just part of every meal here, it is the foundation for all food— breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You eat it with your hands— pour curry and chilis and some sort of meat chunks or fish and green leaves over it all, then grab a glutinous lump with your fingers and go crazy. It’s even sold wrapped in waxen paper at the local McDonalds. Unless I’m forgetting something, I had rice with every single meal here. Come to think of it, Vietnam too. Note to Carol: no rice for dinner please, until further notice.

One of the best things about shooting a documentary here is, everyone’s warm and hospitable. I’ve been plenty of places where, when you stick a camera in someone’s face or even set it up from afar, either they wave you off, tell you to get lost… or they get lost themselves. But not here. Frankly, if it were me, I’d probably run you off if your camera was catching me in my worst moments… but for most of the people in the villages here, and millions in the cities, worst moments are the only moments they have.

Yet everyone, and I mean everyone, was cooperative and helpful. Before we’d leave a shooting location, there’d even be a little “thank you” ceremony for us. Maybe because they know we’re trying to bring attention to their bad water, which ultimately might help make it better. However, these ceremonies bring their own little challenges, because inevitably there’ll be some food and drink, and I can’t help but wonder whether I am about to cross into their food chain. But protocol makes demands, so I swallow, and chew, and pray to every god I know.

These thank you ceremonies take place just about everywhere we go. Paul, the cameraman, hates them; he’d rather be out somewhere looking through the camera. So when we arrive someplace, inevitably no matter how poor they are, people have something to eat and drink waiting for us. When it’s time to start, Paul disappears, and I shake hands all around (although if a woman doesn’t extend hers, I don’t offer mine in this Muslim nation), say thanks in the local tongue, holding my hands together as if in prayer, then sit at a table and begin to eat and drink. The funny thing is, nobody sits with me. There I am, sitting in the middle of the room or the field all alone, usually with at least a dozen people just standing there watching me. While the capital of Jakarta and a few other places in Indonesia are used to tourists, westerners really stand out where we’ve been. So much so that I’ve had children scream and cry when I gently patted their heads. But the grownups honor us. A few told me that they’ve actually never seen a “white man” before.

The fact is, just about anywhere I’ve ever gone, people are friendly to you if you’re friendly to them. Here it’s especially important for two reasons. First, they’re just plain nice people who smile back if you smile first. In the past I’ve always felt that people in North Africa, from Egypt to Morocco, are the nicest on earth. Even in Libya when I used to go down there in the 70s and 80s, while our governments didn’t see eye to eye, the people would give you their right arm if you needed it. Now I’ll add Indonesia to that list. The second reason to be friendly is, right now this isn’t the safest place for people like us to be— and by “us,” I mean the Australian cameraman, and me.

That’s because of the terrorist bombings on the Indonesian island of Bali six years ago. More than two hundred people died, mostly Australians, and just last month, three Islamic terrorists convicted of the crime were executed by a firing squad, which Australia urged Indonesia to do. The U.S.? We just get swept in. But the result is, Washington has issued a travel warning which says, don’t come. The result for us is, take an extra look around you when you walk out any door, be a little more wary when you’re on the street, and act extra nice with everyone you meet. That might go without saying, but there’s another reason beyond the obvious one: the people to whom you pay just a bit of special attention might be, in a hard situation, your most important allies.

Anyway, let me get to why we came. People in many parts of this country — which means across its more than 17,000 islands — use the same water for their toilet, their tub, and their tap. I could be more explicit but probably don’t have to be. That seems gross to us, of course, because we know how bad it is. They don’t. The cost of clean water is one problem. Public education about dirty water is another. Using the side of your home to deposit your waste is one problem. Having anyplace else to do it is another.

We spent our first day in rural villages, and from one of them, we followed people along an undulating muddy path to their only source of water: a well the color brown. As they carried their buckets, we carried our television gear, climbing and descending the better part of a mile (and coming close to slipping more than once). When we got to the well, others who preceded us were washing clothing and bodies and filling buckets to take back to their village. When you look at the filthy pools of water on the ground all around the well, you see that it seeps into the earth and eventually back into the well itself.

In another village, we went down a muddy bank to the river, where men and women have separate bamboo rafts tethered to the side. That’s where they go to refresh their bodies and their buckets. They’re brushing their teeth and washing their dishes and taking their water for cooking and drinking, all from the same place. When you look at the surface of the water flowing toward them, it’s already foul before they foul it more.

But this isn’t just a problem in rural villages. Far from it. Just today as I write this, in the city of Palembang, I stood on a bridge and looked down upon ramshackle wooden huts with tin roofs, built along the Musi River. The water is a nauseating shade of mud, and every form of debris is floating on the current. But even worse is what’s down below. We saw a man come out of his hut, for instance, and squat in a small half-open enclosure, which was built over the water. It was his toilet. We saw naked kids bathing in the water, women scrubbing their clothes and brushing their teeth and washing their vegetables and filling empty plastic water bottles— incredulous, we even watched a teenage boy doing back flips into the river from a wooden beam outside his house, as if he was on a diving board at a pool in Beverly Hills— all in this putrid cesspool whose smell alone was almost too much to bear. (That’s the other photo in the email: the kid was jumping from one of the huts on the left… while part of the time we were there, a man was over on the right, using the same water as his toilet.)

We also went to two homes where people have, for the first time in their lives, clean water coming into the house. One was a middle class home— poor by our standards but middle class here— and the water comes from a newly installed tap protruding from the wall right over a dank brick tub and right next to the home’s squatter toilet. The whole family was there for our arrival, and when the father marched me into this damp, dark, diminutive room to show me the tap, he had pride on his face like he was showing me his first born child.

The other was a lower class home, built on stilts because it stands atop a putrid pond where the mother used to put chlorine because that was her only water supply. Just two months ago she got a tap installed just outside the house with a short hose through which, intermittently, water slowly flows. As we sat on her rudimentary couch near the front door, we had two kids squeezed in with us, and the mother explained how happy she is to have clean water because the boy had often had white spots on his skin, which a doctor told her was some sort of skin disease from washing in the fetid water, and the girl had just been hospitalized for ten days with a serious case of diarrhea. Yet when we were outside watching the woman use her new tap, a huge rat appeared about five feet away. That’s because although they now have the tap, they still haven’t learned that the kind of standing water that surrounds their house, especially when every kind of rubbish is deposited in it, still breeds disease. You see those conditions almost everywhere.

The World Bank is trying to help Indonesia’s bigger cities improve both their capacity and their reach, to put clean water into more homes. It’s part of a pilot project which, if it succeeds, can be duplicated in other parts of the world where the quality of water we take for granted is only a dream. In fact the idea for this story came from a friend who’s with the American Water Works Association, a big alliance of U.S. water treatment plants, which is helping the World Bank. The thing is, we went to Palembang’s main water treatment plant, where water from this horrible Musi River comes in disgusting and goes out clean. What I learned was, water treatment isn’t high tech and doesn’t have to be. There only has to be a will, and the money to put it to work.

Just one more “third world” story to tell, and it’s not about water, or driving; in fact it’s not even all about Indonesia. But it’s emblematic of societies where somehow, they just don’t think like we do.

To get here from Vietnam, we had to fly late one night to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we would go through Customs and enter the country to overnight before our morning flight to Indonesia.

There are two airports in Kuala Lumpur, including a spacious shiny new one. We weren’t there.

We were at an aging airport mobbed with people in funny clothes who didn’t look like they’d have a penny in their pocket. Too little space for too many hordes. No signage and total confusion about where to go and how to queue. It’s probably a part of the culture as it is in other countries, but these people all just crowd forward as if there’s no one else waiting in front of them or trying to get past them.

Our arrival was funny, if nearly disastrous. It’s just the cameraman and me, and on arrival we had seven cases altogether, which we piled onto two carts. We got outside the chaotic terminal into a solid unmoving mass of humanity, and when it was obvious no one was going to clear a path, we shouted, tapped people on shoulders, eventually physically pushed people out of our way. No choice.

We were headed for the taxi rank, which had so many people around it it looked like they were fleeing a tsunami. But the taxi rank is adjacent to an “island,” as at any airport where there are different “islands” for catching the shuttles to parking and hotels and so forth. But this island was different. It was sloped. I mean, it’s maybe three feet from curb to curb but if you can picture this, the curb on one side is a good foot higher than the curb on the other side.

You might see where this is going. With the cars bunched so close together, it’s impossible to push the carts along the roadway. So you’re trying to negotiate them through crowds (everyone’s struggling with their own carts) along this steep sloping island, which means you’re always fighting gravity. At one point, with the high side of the island on my right, the cart I was pushing, which among other things had our $80,000 camera balanced on top with my right hand gripping the handle, began to tip to the left. Suddenly the whole cart was going over. The trouble is, not only was the camera going to hit the ground, but it was all headed toward another cart a foot away piled high with luggage. I caught mine just in time and struggled with my one free hand to get it upright again, but the cart next to mine didn’t survive; it went into another cart, and altogether four carts full of baggage tipped over. Into the roadway, in the middle of the crowds. I didn’t stop and take my toll of the damage. I just got out of there fast as I could.

But that was child’s play compared to the airport at our penultimate stop, the city of Makassar on the island of Sulawesi.

Once we gathered our cases there and put them on two carts, we made our way out to the “greeting” area. But our landing coincided with a lot of chartered flights, bringing people home from the Haj. That’s when Muslims who can, make their once-in-a-lifetime visit to Mecca. So probably a thousand people were packed into the fenced in greeting area, all smiling and waving and screaming and women yelping to meet their loved ones coming home from the Haj. It is a great honor to do the Haj, because it indicates both religious obedience and financial prosperity. (Once someone has done the Haj, their name in print is preceded here by the letter “H.” So if it were me for example, in writing I’d be referred to as “Mr. H. Greg Dobbs.”)

Once again, we and our carts were foiled by islands and curbs. We had to push through the excited crowd to get from the terminal to the first curb, but thankfully it had a nice little ramp onto the roadway which let us easily reach the island on the other side. But the curb on that side was a good twelve inches high, with no ramp… and the taxi rank was three identical islands away. So every time anyone reaches an island, including us with our 187 pounds of gear, we have to unload everything and move it manually across the island, then physically lift the cart itself across, then set it down on the next roadway and load it again and cross to the next curb and do it all over again. Madness. When this place was built, what were these people thinking?!

But I don’t want to leave on a negative note, so let me praise the airlines in Asia; they make up for what the airports miss. In the course of my travels on this continent, I took one flight on Cathay Pacific Airlines, two on Air Asia, three on Vietnam Airlines, and three on Indonesia’s Garuda. Not once did a plane leave even five minutes late, all but one served mints and a meal, free, and I never waited more than five minutes for luggage, in fact twice it got to the carousel even before I did. Like the auto industry and the banking industry and the electronics industry and others, it kind of makes me wonder what’s gone wrong at home.

I’m ready to be home, and shall probably send this as I start the trip. I won’t miss the heat and I won’t miss the roads and I won’t miss the sad stories to which we were witness … but besides very nice people everywhere we went, I will miss one thing in particular: standing in a room, or an elevator, or a field, with a bunch of Indonesians, or Vietnamese, and having to drop my chin to look down upon them. Now I know how it feels in the States to be six-foot-plus.

May your new year bring blessings.